By Emma Copley Eisenberg
Liz gathered her hair into her cap and spat again onto a spot of floodlit asphalt trying to get the slightly salty carsick taste out of her mouth and shake off the feeling of failure that choosing a bad ride gave her. In Barstow, she’d chosen a new-looking black Volkswagen sedan containing two chatty newlyweds who were going to the Grand Canyon and could take her as far as Flagstaff, but after the wife realized she’d forgotten her curling iron and insisted on going back for it, they had deposited Liz at this dinky filling station in Newberry Springs without so much as a sorry.
You can get a ride from here, right?
Sure, Liz had said. Sure.
It wasn’t so much about time as it was about miles. Apple’s letter had only reached her the day before on her friend’s wrought-iron balcony in San Francisco, where she had sat in the sun grinding coffee from the good grocery store with a hand grinder. But Liz took a certain pride in each ride being worth a certain amount of miles, ideally not less than three hundred, and to end up here, just twenty miles east of where the couple had picked her up, was unacceptable.
Liz sat down on the curb in front of the entrance to the filling station’s store. July, but it got cold at night in the desert, and the sweat that had collected underneath the mass of her hair in her cap and run down the front of her short-sleeved men’s undershirt was drying now and making her shiver. She was hungry. Her friend in San Francisco had a hand coffee grinder but no food and no washing machine, and they’d spent most of the twenty-eight days Liz was there drinking coffee and eating cheese cubes at photography openings on Haight Street for people they only sort of knew. In the abstract sense, Liz had plenty of money, but it was money that she couldn’t touch unless a man in a too-tight suit in Massachusetts said she could, and even then, to get it took advance planning, took phone calls and decision-making about whether to keep Coca-Cola or sell Hammertown Leather Goods, questions about which Liz cared not at all. Often, she genuinely forgot the money was there.
I’m tired, she thought, noticing that this feeling was happening more and more, a real sluggishness in her, right down to the bone. Her first ride, from a truck stop just outside Oakland, to Barstow, had been good, four hundred and three miles, but the trucker had gotten tired and stopped for a nap. She’d offered to drive for a while – had done it before, once outside San Antonio for a driver who’d added too much gin to his juice and was afraid his company would give him the axe, and again on her way from Montreal to her grandmother’s funeral in Bridgeport (which she’d missed anyway) but this trucker just scoffed and told her, Not in this life.
On the curb in Newberry Springs, Liz watched the off ramp from I-40. Her only chance was a sloppy trucker who’d been too lazy or forgetful or bold to stop in Barstow but who had come around to realize that this filling station was the last thing before the Mojave. Or a lost car who’d meant to go on 15 to Vegas, and would stop at the filling station to turn around and head back west, in which case she could go back to Barstow and try again.
Just then, beyond the illuminated pumps, she saw the glint of the silver head of an eighteen-wheeler that was slowly inching forward in the darkness of the parking lot. The truck came to a slow stop, then the cab door opened and the cab light went on. The driver hopped down, leaving the light on, the door open, and the engine idling.
He’s green, Liz thought.
The driver strode towards where she sat on the curb, and he looked at her, the way a younger man looks at an older woman, a little desiring, a little afraid, and then went into the store. He was really young, maybe eighteen. Liz took her cap off and let her long hair tumble down, put a hand in her hair at the crown and loosened it a bit. She stood, lifted her pack, and walked over to where the truck was idling. From the way the tires were riding, she could tell the boy was on a Deadhead trip, that he wouldn’t be in a hurry.
Hey, said the boy, frowning, when he came out of the store and saw her leaning against the container.
You’re on a Deadhead trip, said Liz.
So? said the boy.
So maybe you want some company. Where you headed?
Where are you headed? asked the boy, hoisting up his bag of soda and chips against his small chest.
I asked you first, said Liz.
Albuquerque.
That’s right on my way. I’ll be no trouble at all.
I don’t know. The company says not to.
Liz told him a story, about a man on a Deadhead trip, heading back after dropping off a load of refrigerators, who’d picked up a hitchhiker and found true love.
You’re saying you’re my true love? The boy was smiling a little.
Liz knew she was pretty. She was tall and thinner than she’d ever been from her diet of coffee and cheese cubes. She tossed her hair over her shoulder. In the backlighting, the boy saw now, the edges of her hair glowing.
Man, she said to the boy, you’re just gonna have to give me a ride and find out.
The boy drove through the night and Liz talked. She talked about all the places she’d been. She told the boy about Old Faithful and Nashville and Bourbon Street. The boy said he’d never seen any of those things, but had she hitched on 70 before? The way, if you drive the stretch from Hays, Kansas, into Denver at sunset, it looks like you’re driving straight into the sun because the sky is so wide?
She had, last year, and got silent at the memory. She was an East Coast kid, and when you’re an East Coast kid, and cross, at twenty-four, into the West, it’s not a thing that will ever leave you.
* * *
Jenny drew back the light curtains and looked out the window onto the quiet cul de sac. Jenny was worried that when Liz arrived, things would change between her and Apple. They had been a kind of family, just Jenny and Apple in Apple’s small ranch house filled with light and cacti. Then Apple’s boyfriend Greg had dumped her. Apple had spent three days at home in her scrubs and then written to Liz, who was a drifter and a free spirit and whose name Jenny had heard many times before from her older sister’s stories of sharing an apartment with Apple and Liz while the three of them were students at the University of Iowa.
Jenny was from Staten Island, grew up Irish, watching the Statue of Liberty from the ferry. She had left a big public university in upstate New York after a semester. Her apartment had been small and cold and a professor had written, in the margin of her research paper on President Carter, this paper is exhaustive and exhausting.She’d caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror, in the bathroom at a party, while a boy kissed the side of her neck, and she’d told herself, go. Jenny’s sister told her that Apple was living in Sedona, and that despite the fact that she worked at an old folks home, Apple was “an adventure.” Jenny had an image in her mind of the Southwest. She was thinking of Frida Kahlo. She was thinking of the women who sold silver bracelets at the craft fairs in upstate New York, their arms heavy with turquoise. She wrote to Apple over Thanksgiving, and by New Year’s Eve she was packed. What she couldn’t carry, she put on the curb, except for her typewriter which she spent her last dollars to ship. As 1979 became 1980, Jenny lurched forward on a Greyhound bus. She wrote in her journal for a while, then turned her overhead light off and watched the road, watching the state welcome signs fall one after another like a deck of cards.
Jenny and Apple had planted a garden in the back of Apple’s house; tomatoes, corn, squash that never came up, lettuce. They had watched movies on Apple’s VCR, a gift from Greg, and documentaries about self-sufficient living and interviews with couples who had gone back to the land. They had read Mother Earth News together. Jenny had gotten a job at an organic grocery store and brought home the slightly bruised fruits and day-old pastries. They had dabbled in canning and pickling, trying to apply the skills they’d learned from a preservation class at the local community center, and brought food to an old lady at the back of their cul de sac in exchange for bread making lessons.
At night, in front of a fire, one would read out loud and the other would knit and then they would switch. Jenny would read Mary Oliver and Wendell Berry to Apple, and Apple tried to picture all those different kinds of bird — a Canadian goose, a blue heron — but couldn’t get the sandpipers of the Iowa prairies from childhood bird watching trips out of her mind. From the suburbs of Iowa City, Apple had moved into the city proper where she was supposedly studying Anthropology, but was actually following flyers to meetings of the Women’s Liberation Front and a group of activists coordinating actions for the United Farm Workers. She’d taken the long way through school, eventually dropping out and supporting herself by cutting hair, then finally re-enrolling, and being assigned Liz and Jenny’s sister as suitemates. She’d been a junkie the whole time she was in Iowa City. Heroin took Apple somewhere where she could go and shut the door against all the things that could not, would not, change. Liz had sometimes gotten high with her, but Liz could brush her knees off and go for a run or go to class and leave the drugs behind. Apple could not do a thing halfway, and long after Liz and Jenny’s sister had moved on to start their lives, Apple stayed behind in Iowa City, to attend consciousness raising groups and shoot heroin. A year ago her grandmother had died and when, at the funeral, the lawyer read off that the old woman had left her house in Sedona to Apple, she cried, not from the loss of her grandmother, but out of gratitude. Sedona, she thought. Sedona.
Apple liked the idea of playing host to her friend’s kid sister, liked watching Jenny paw through her tapes, liked stirring tomato sauce as Jenny played and rewound the same Janis Joplin song again and again or came in raving about how she’d discovered the Tex-Mex restaurant in the center of town where Apple been buying breakfast burritos for years on her way to work. Apple felt at once, beyond Jenny, and behind her, constantly playing catch up with the breakneck speed at which the wheels in Jenny’s brain seemed to crank. Apple told Jenny that her days of being an adventure were behind her, but sometimes on the evenings before she had to work the night shift at the nursing home, she would call up a man who would come over in a green van and trade her amphetamines for cuttings of her cacti.
Part Two
No use waiting for Liz like that, said Apple, watering the cacti with a small tin watering can. She just shows up when she wants to.
But Jenny didn’t move from the window. Apple put down the watering can.
Let me do your hair, she said. I invited the gang over for music night.
Jenny always wore her hair in two thick brown braids, but she let Apple wash it, comb it out, and rebraid it into one enormous French braid on the screened-in porch while the sun went behind the red cliffs. Apple’s sandy brown hair was chopped short as a boy’s.
On music nights, Apple’s friends, mostly aging hippies who’d retired to Sedona and a few of her coworkers from the nursing home, would come over to play folk songs. The leader was a forty-ish man named Otto who was in a band that sometimes played restaurants and hotels around Sedona. Otto and Apple and the others played guitars and harmonicas, sometimes a bongo or a tambourine. They played Peter, Paul and Mary, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and always, always The Band. On these nights, Jenny was happy. She liked to sit in the circle with everyone else who was playing music, even though she didn’t play any instrument.
That night, Otto told the group about how his dad had taught him how to play guitar. An idea bloomed before Jenny’s eyes. It was the idea that talent could be passed down. It was the idea of being proud of doing the same thing as those that had come before you. Jenny’s mother was a secretary at an accounting firm. She didn’t have any hobbies. When she came home from work, before coming into the kitchen, she had often sat, for five or ten minutes in a big wooden chair in their hallway, with her coat and scarf still on.
After they’d drunk lots of red wine and smoked lots of dope, Jenny went up to the loft where she slept and listened to them play. They played “I Shall Be Released” and Jenny looked out the skylight at the wide Arizona sky. Jenny harbored certain opinions, unpopular with Apple and her friends below, about America. After high school, she had tried to enlist in the Army, but was denied because of a childhood accident with a slingshot that left her legally blind in her left eye. Below her they sang, I’d ring out Danger! I’d ring out Warning! I’d ring out love between my brothers and my sisters all over this land.
From between the hard covers of her notebook, Jenny took out the pamphlet for the Rainbow Family Gathering that an older family friend of hers from home had sent her shortly after she had moved to Sedona. The friend’s name was Nina Daniels and she’d left Staten Island to volunteer in a new government antipoverty program.
It’s called VISTA, Nina had said when they’d seen each other over holidays. Like a big view.
But Nina had stuck around after doing two years of big views, and hooked up with other transplanted young people to form a commune. Nina had enclosed the pamphlet and a picture of herself with a tall bearded husband and a newborn baby girl, leaning against a wood platform, along with a note:
This is right near where our commune is. A peace festival in the woods! It’ll be a blast!
Jenny had never been to West Virginia, but until recently, she’d never been to Arizona either. The words WELCOME HOME were scrawled across the top of the pamphlet in big orange block letters. Below that, was an excerpt from a hippie book she remembered kids at college reading, that said Let me remind you who you really are. You’re an Immortal Freedom Lover in service to Divine Love. The pamphlet showed a diagram of the Monongahela National Forest and some different routes people could take to get there. On the back cover was scrawled, May you always be all ways free. The Gathering was soon, just a month away now, in late June. But Jenny didn’t wanted to shake things up, had been happy and comfortable in Sedona with Apple. Plus she was broke, had spent all her savings on the bus ticket from New York. She put the pamphlet back in her notebook.
When Jenny woke up, she heard Apple clearing dishes and beer bottles and then she heard her stop, with a clatter, and slide open the glass front door.
Jenny looked down from the loft and saw a tall blonde woman whose hair was tied up in a bandana and who was toting a big green backpack hug Apple and say, I love you, but first things first. Jenny took in a breath of sadness, at all the shared history between these hugging women, all the things that Liz knew about Apple that she would never know. Then she climbed down the ladder.
After Liz had showered and put the contents of her backpack and the backpack itself in the wash, the three women drove to Sedona’s only all-night diner. Liz slid into the near side of the booth, and Jenny into the far side. Jenny was sure Apple would choose Liz, but to her surprise, Apple walked the extra steps and took the seat next to Jenny without hesitating.
Liz drew her arms up and rested them confidently on the vinyl booth as if putting them around two invisible people, and slouched down, letting her legs slide apart.
I can’t believe you’re still hitching, said Apple. Aren’t you scared?
It’s not like that, Liz said. It’s not like some movie where the hitchhiker dies. It’s just people, just people traveling around, just like you. Either they pick you up or they don’t. Besides, Liz said, taking a sip of coffee, the universe is fundamentally friendly. It will always take you exactly where you need to go, exactly when you need to get there.
Apple laughed. Oh, right. What’s that, some psycho-babble?
Call it what you want, said Liz, but I got your letter in San Francisco yesterday, and here I am today. Eight hundred miles. Two rides. She toasted Apple with her cup of black coffee.
Well, Apple said. I wouldn’t know how to do it. I wouldn’t know how to begin. Do you really stick your thumb out?
While they caught up about the years since college and talked about which friends had moved where and which had stayed in Iowa City, Jenny studied a middle-aged man in a nearby booth who looked like he might be a trucker. It was nearly two in the morning, and he and Liz were the only people in the place drinking coffee. He had a pudgy face with big, visible pores, and a slightly droopy mustache. On the table in front of him, he had placed a small black transistor radio. The way he leaned over it, bringing his ear down very close to the radio but not touching it reminded Jenny of her father who was the manager at an electronics factory that made radios. Last spring when Jenny had graduated high school and was trying to decide what she would do, she occasionally tried to ask her father questions as he puttered around the house in his socks after work. How many of the states have you been in out of fifty, not including layovers or drive-throughs? What (if any) is the difference between a buffalo and a bison? Why does a mandolin have eight strings, if it can make only four notes?
But her father would just turn on the radio, press his ear close to it, and say, let’s find out, as if all the answers to life’s questions would be found there, eventually.
* * *
The three women got into Apple’s green Cadillac, flat and wide as a boat, which had also been the grandmother’s, and which wheezed when Apple stepped on the accelerator. With the windows rolled up, Liz felt a deep sense of contentment. She’d been in San Francisco that morning and now she was in Sedona. She thought of the boy trucker who’d driven her all the way into Sedona and dropped her off just a mile from Apple’s house.
You guys should come hitching with me when I leave, Liz said, into the dark car.
Okay, said Jenny, from the backseat, so quickly she surprised even herself.
Apple kept her eyes straight on the road. It was so late, she realized. There was not another car on the road, and when she turned in at the entrance to their development, every single light was off.
Everyone else, every sane person, is at home asleep, Apple thought, and she was suddenly angry with Liz for busting open their quiet routine, and with Jenny, for being so willing to abandon it.
Inside, Apple switched on a single lamp in the living room.
As Apple and Liz got ready for bed, Jenny climbed to her loft bed and retrieved the pamphlet about the Gathering in West Virginia. She laid it on the coffee table and sat on the plastic covered sofa, looking at it. Liz came over and leaned over the back of the sofa to look too.
Huh, Liz said. I’ve heard those Rainbow Gatherings are a lot of fun. I’ve never been to West Virginia. If you don’t count drive-throughs.
I don’t, said Jenny.
Liz took the pamphlet and gave it to Apple. Could be just what you need, said Liz.
I don’t need anything, said Apple, but she held the pamphlet in her hand, and turned it over, reading the back.
May you always be all ways free.
* * *
In the morning, in the sun room, Liz and Jenny studied Liz’s trucker’s atlas. Apple stood at the sink doing dishes, watching them through the pass-through. Liz told Jenny how the odd highways go north-south and the even ones go east-west. Then she told Jenny about the best places to stand, what to wear, and gave her different points of view on the question of sign or no sign.
But really, women hitchhiking cross country, said Liz, I don’t think we’ll have any problems getting a ride.
Apple turned the water off and wiped her hands on her jeans. She got a pack of cigarettes from under one of her larger potted cacti, took one out, and leaned over the stove, lighting the cigarette on the front burner.
Shit, said Liz. Now it’s serious.
Apple shrugged.
For someone who’s not interested, you sure seem interested, said Liz.
Even if I was, I could never get the time off from work, Apple said. How long are we talking anyway?
Liz took the cigarette from Apple and took a long drag.
Jenny studied the map. It’s just over two thousand miles, said Jenny, from here to where the Gathering will be.
Figure four days to get there, just to be on the safe side, said Liz, giving the cigarette back to Apple, a week there, maybe more, four days back for you guys. Three weeks?
Jenny and Liz looked at Apple, who was leaning against a wall, smoking.
Apple was twenty-seven, which was starting to feel like it might as well be thirty. She basically liked her job at the nursing home. There was a resident called Tiny who was very large and who would talk only to her, telling her each day the same story of how he and his brother had built a log cabin with their own two hands, how it was the thing he was most proud of in the world. The other nurses had dark senses of humor like hers, and when the residents were hateful or spiteful or messy, there was whiskey in paper cones to take the edge off. But there was also the snotty doctor from Tucson who talked to her like she was a child, always telling her she was doing the wrong thing. There was also the break room, painted salmon, just a white collapsible table and a sink full of perpetually dirty coffee mugs with words like Cisplamin and Actpran printed on them and dirty spoons all with the same dark drop of coffee pooled in the head. And there was Greg, who’d told her there was no inch of her body that wasn’t like divine worship, and then asked for his VCR back.
I’ve never seen the ocean, said Apple. Could we go to the ocean first?
Definitely, said Liz. We can go anywhere you want.
Okay, said Apple, her body buzzing from the nicotine. Okay.
Part Three
The planning began. At the grocery store, Jenny slowly stockpiled dried fruit and nuts as per Liz’s instructions for their road food. The director of the nursing home told Apple that it was a long time to ask off, but that if she was serious about her future there (she was) then her job would probably still be there when she got back. At night, Liz became part of their nightly ritual. She didn’t know how to knit, but she’d close her eyes and listen or stoke the fire. When it was her turn to read, she read better than either Jenny or Apple, deep and steady, and so over the several weeks it took them to prepare for the trip, Liz did most of the reading aloud.
The night before they left, they propped up their packs in the mudroom, three in a line. Jenny’s was the biggest by a landslide. Apple got drunk on wine and called Greg. He came over, and while they were in Apple’s bedroom, Jenny and Liz sat in the living room by the fire. Neither of them felt like reading aloud.
Are you excited about going back east? asked Jenny. Apple told me you were from Massachusetts.
Not really, said Liz. But I’m excited about being in the woods.
How long have you been on the road?
Let’s see. Three years?
Liz thought about it. It was three years, almost to the day, she realized, since she’d driven from Iowa City, college diploma in hand, to Massachusetts General to watch her mother die of lung cancer, then driven directly back to Iowa City, shot heroin with Apple, cleaned out the apartment she shared with Apple and Jenny’s sister, and sold her car, a new, silver BMW sedan. It was all that driving that taught her about roads, about traffic, about how to flow with things in motion. It was all that driving by herself at night that made the knowledge that she was twenty-one years old and her mother was dead seem like a thing that could be passed through, that could be survived. On the way there, she thought, I’m in Illinois and my mother is dying. I’m in Indiana and my mother is dying. I’m in Ohio and my mother is dying.
On the way back, she thought, as long as I am in a place I’ve never been before, it will be like being where my mother is. She took a long way home. In West Virginia, she thought, I’m in West Virginia, and my mother has died. I’m in Kentucky and my mother has died. I’m in Missouri and my mother has died. When she reached the edge of Iowa City, and started to pass familiar places – her grocery store, her friends’ houses – her skin began to burn. Yes, all that driving alone had been the thing that had lifted the curtain and revealed to her that she could hitchhike.
And you haven’t stayed anywhere longer than a month? asked Jenny.
That’s right.
And nothing bad has ever happened to you?
Liz smiled. Not from hitching.
Jenny thought about telling Liz that she was thinking about not coming back to Sedona. The week before she’d sold her typewriter and given her record collection and her only pair of high-heeled shoes to the new girl at the grocery store. Then she’d crammed her pack full of everything else she owned. She’d written back to her high school friend who lived on the commune near the Gathering, farming and living simply off the land. After the Gathering, she intended to stay and see what she could see.
They sat there in silence and watched the fire and Jenny turned and looked at Liz, this woman with muscled arms, who was only five years her senior.
Liz sighed, looked at Apple’s closed door, looked back at Jenny and said, we’ve got to do something about the size of your pack.
* * *
It was early but hot already and they walked the mile or so from Apple’s house to the shopping plaza where there was the all night diner plus a big gas station. Watch and learn, Liz said, and Apple rolled her eyes but followed Liz to a flat stretch of road with a wide shoulder right before the turn to get on 89 North which would take them to I-40. Hang back a little, Liz gestured to Apple and Jenny, and they stepped off the asphalt shoulder and stood in the shade of an Ash tree. No talking unless they talk to you first, no personal details, no telling them where we’re headed, keep your pack in your lap, never in the trunk. Liz barked loudly, not looking in their direction. Liz held a small cardboard sign that just said EAST in big, black Sharpie letters. A maroon Buick slowed and stopped, driven by an older man with hair long as Willie Nelson’s. Hey, the man said. I can take you as far as Williams, and Liz said, Great, I’m on my way back east to work for Carter, and the man said, Right on, and Liz said, Thing is, hanging her head through the passenger side window now, I’m traveling with my two compadres here, and I promised them we’d stick together. There was Willie Nelson music and lots of conversation about Carter and how the Grand Canyon can cure anything that ails you. Jenny and Apple each cracked a smile. Williams, Arizona. Sixty-three miles.
An hour spent choosing, several passenger cars turned down for insufficient mileage potential. Apple objected to the rejection of two young men going back to school at UNM. Then, a winner, approached while filling. I know it’s not company practice, sir, but I’m traveling with my two sisters here, and I promised our mother we’d stick together. Middle-aged trucker named Henry who called his rig Heavenly Betsy. Turns were taken between playing rummy in the sleeper and talking to Henry about his own daughters, aged fifteen and eighteen, both of whom wanted to grow up to be rodeo stars, though Henry would prefer them to be teachers. Two stops for peeing and one for the night in Albuquerque. Henry ate McDonald’s while the women sat outside and ate dried fruit and nuts. Debate over whether to trust Henry to not mess with them while sleeping. Guarantee of being taken to Amarillo in the morning proved decisive. Henry snored and slept in the driver’s seat, while Jenny was awake the whole night with the adrenaline of changing her life. In the morning, the wide west Texas sky cut the world in half. Amarillo, Texas. Six hundred forty-one miles.
Apple insisted on showering at the truck stop. In the mirror looked up and saw another woman with short hair. Juliet was traveling with her boyfriend. They really were headed to D.C. to work for Carter. Names were exchanged all around, a ride to the boyfriend’s camp in the Ozarks was offered in the couple’s Volvo station wagon. At the camp, Apple and Juliet talked about the politics of leather jackets, Jenny wrote in her journal, and Liz built the fire, log cabin style, her favorite thing. In the morning, everyone was in good spirits. Juliet and her boyfriend let the women out at a Waffle House, then changed their minds and rushed in just in time to order. Hash browns for all. Memphis, Tennessee. Seven hundred twenty-four miles.
It was raining in Memphis, and the women huddled under the Waffle House awning for several hours, taking turns as the spokeswoman. Apple gave a father and son in a Mercedes a big smile, but in the end, it was Jenny who reeled in a middle-aged woman in a Chevy minivan. For gosh sakes, girls, get in the car, she said, chucking a twelve-pack of toilet paper in the way back, then complaining all the way to Florence about the stains their boots were making on the floor mats. You girls are as bad as my husband and his friends, she said, for shame, and let them out, to Liz’s dismay, in front of a department store in downtown Florence with instructions to, make yourselves presentable! One hundred fifty-five miles.
They walked to the gas station in the middle of town, Liz spluttering obscenities. Liz was firm, taking the lead on the next ride, Birmingham or bust. If you’ll fit, I’ll take you, said a big woman in a Dodge king cab truck. Deb was chatty and Apple told her about the minivan woman’s directive, and before long Jenny peed her jeans laughing. Deb turned up her Janis Joplin tape and they took turns doing impressions. Liz won, and when they got to her house, Deb offered Liz her couch in the small house that Deb shared with her sister, while Apple and Jenny set up the tent in Deb’s yard. Apple and Jenny wanted to go explore, felt on fire with seeing such an important site in the civil rights movement. Liz shrugged, but went along anyway, so Deb dropped them all off at Kelly Park, which they explored, then walked to the 16th Street Baptist Church. Apple led the charge towards a nearby diner, where they all sat and drank milkshakes. There’s only white people in here, said Apple, loudly, and then left a lousy tip. Liz gave the couch to Apple who stayed up with Deb to talk about injustice. Jenny and Liz slept, spooning, next to the tent, under a foggy, moonless sky. Birmingham, Alabama. One hundred seventeen miles.
They had their pick of truckers to approach at the filling station on the eastbound side of I-20 where Deb dropped them off with a fake salute. Liz was freshly showered, but none of the truckers seemed to want the trouble. Then she spotted one with a big jeweled cross hanging from the rearview who looked like he was dressed for Sunday church. You a Christian? asked the trucker, straightening a framed portrait of the Virgin Mary on the wall of the cab. Sure, said Liz. Liz walked back to the curb where Apple and Jenny were sitting. You said you wanted to see the ocean, Liz said. How about South Carolina? Apple and Jenny squealed with delight. The AC was broken and the trucker quoted scripture the whole way. Jenny stayed in the front seat the entire ride, because she was the most tolerant, the only one who could listen to the scripture without being rude, and Liz and Apple stifled laughs from the back. The trucker wouldn’t stop, not to eat, not to pee. Apple passed out briefly from the heat. When he pulled off for gas, they slammed the door behind them, forgetting to say thank you. Charleston, South Carolina. Four hundred forty-eight miles.
Let’s just get in the next car that will take us, said Apple. Three college kids, two boys and a girl in a Pathfinder, Jenny and Liz rode in the back. Folly Beach, South Carolina. Twelve miles.
Jenny watched Apple’s face as they walked the boardwalk and then the sand path to the ocean. How would it have been different, to be from a landlocked place? thought Jenny. How would it have been different to be from a place where you could see the ocean? thought Apple. I’m in South Carolina, thought Liz, and my mother will always be dead.
Part Four
For three days, they ate king crab and shared platters of shrimp cocktail and camped on the beach. They pooled their money and bought peanut butter and jelly and bread in the local supermarket, wearing only their bathing suits, because Liz had said towels took up too much room in their packs.
On the third night, they got out the trucker’s atlas.
It’s time to go, isn’t it, Lizzie? said Apple, munching on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Fraid so, said Liz. The Gathering starts tomorrow.
I’m excited, said Apple. Maybe I’ll meet someone there, get Greg out of my mind.
Liz scoffed. Hippie guys are the worst boyfriends.
Like you’re one to talk, said Apple. Shall we recall, what was his name? Moonbeam! that you met in Montana and spent all of freshman year fucking?
Exactly, said Liz.
* * *
Back in Charleston, after a serendipitous ride from the same college kids in the same Pathfinder, Liz went into a gas station store and bought a Coke. As she walked back to rejoin her friends in the parking lot, bringing the cold bottle to her lips and letting the bubbly metal liquid hit her teeth, she saw Jenny and Apple in the parking lot, packs on their backs, talking to a young woman who leaned against the round nose of a sky blue Volkswagen beetle. The woman driver looked to be about Liz’s age, had red curly hair piled on top of her head, and wore a flowered country dress with spaghetti straps. She held a hand out to Liz, limp, and palm facing the ground, as if Liz were supposed to kiss it. Liz shook her polished fingertips awkwardly, and the woman smiled and shook a strand of curly hair out of her eyes.
Tina’s headed to Philadelphia, Apple said, but says she can take us as far as Richmond.
Ha, ha, Tina laughed, for no apparent reason, and swatted the air for flies.
Apple looked expectantly at Liz, and when Liz made no answer, Apple got into the front passenger seat, and Jenny followed, taking the back seat behind the driver. Liz got in behind Apple, the Coke sweating big water droplets onto her shorts.
Tina was a grad student back from a research trip she said, and she chatted to them about the books she was reading, inquired after where they’d all gone to college.
After a while, Tina said, It’s sweet, how you girls are traveling together. Then suddenly, Tina merged into the left lane without signaling. Out of her blurry left eye, Jenny could see that the left side of the interstate overlooked a steep cliff, and that there was barely any shoulder.
In fact, said Tina, it’s like you’re a little sisterhood.
Yeah, said Apple, twisting around with her shoulders to smile at Liz and Jenny.
I was in a sorority, said Tina, when I was an undergraduate. I miss it so much. Sometimes I think I don’t have anything to look forward to that will ever be so good again.
Tina sighed and put her right hand in her hair, scratching her scalp, then let her hand fall and come to rest in the center console between her and Apple.
It’s such a nice day, Tina said, and then she put her hand on Apple’s bare left knee.
At first, Apple stayed perfectly still, just looked at Tina’s small hand, confused, as if she were looking at a strange but essentially harmless spider.
My sweethearts, said Tina. My dear hearts. My larks.
Thank you, Apple said, the only thing she could think to say. She squeezed Tina’s hand a little then moved her knee away and Tina’s hand returned into the center console. Liz fished in her pack for the mace, and sat straight up in her seat, ready to spring forward.
Now, now, Tina said, it’s me that is doing you girls a favor, and then her hand was diving back towards Apple’s lap. In one movement, Liz grabbed Tina’s forearm with her right hand and used her left hand to hold a can of mace to Tina’s eyes, not pulling the trigger.
Go ahead, said Tina, stony faced, studying the road ahead, only her left hand holding the wheel. I’ll kill us all. I don’t care about dying.
Pull over the car, Liz said. Liz kept the can of mace to Tina’s eyes.
Hmm, said Tina, clucking her tongue. The Three Musketeers, she laughed. What a joke! How long can you girls keep on hitchhiking? You’ll need me, if you want to make this a real adventure.
I don’t think so, Liz said.
Tina considered this for a second only, then jerked the wheel suddenly and sharply to the right, lurching the car into the right lane and then onto the right-hand road shoulder. The noise was astonishing then, the sound of tires on rumble strips blotted out fear, blotted out pain, so that when Tina jerked the wheel slightly left, screeching the car back into the right lane of traffic and Apple and Liz slammed their heads against their windows and Jenny ended up with her head in Liz’s lap like a child before bedtime, the only thing they registered was gratitude that the car was once again filled with silence.
In the air, Liz lost her grip on Tina’s right arm. Tina had resumed using it to drive, tapping the polished fingernails of both hands on the black leather wheel.
The can of mace had also dropped to the ground. Liz leaned down slowly to retrieve it, then held the cold metal can in her hand and looked at it. The car hummed along.
Liz wet her lips with her tongue.
Pull over the goddamned car, she said, croaking like a teenaged boy.
I don’t know, said Tina. I want to go where you girls are going.
Tina glanced in the rearview mirror, meeting Liz’s eyes, then, keeping her gaze there, she stretched her right hand out and caressed Apple’s face with the back of her hand, then her arm hanging slack, dragged her knuckles down Apple’s neck and left breast, then stopped at Apple’s thigh. Apple was breathing heavily, as if she’d just exercised.
Jenny felt it as Tina pushed her foot to the pedal and accelerated. In her mind, Jenny remembered and re-wrote the words from the pamphlet, Let me remind you who you really are. You’re an Immortal Freedom Lover in service to Divine Love. Jenny tried to make her mind into a warm white balloon, cozy and airy at once. She tried to love this woman, Tina.
You can come if you want to, said Jenny. We’re on a great trip. We’re going to a party in the woods. There will be music and good people.
Tina sighed, and took her hand from Apple’s thigh. Yes, Tina said. Oh, yes.
Liz looked at the speedometer; they were going a little under seventy. If she could get Tina to slow down somehow, and they could roll out. She’d never done it, never had to before, but thought, it’s possible. It has to be.
The one bad thing will be the food, Jenny went on. It will be all hippie food, salad and such. Sure it might be good for you, but this is probably our last chance to eat something really delicious before we get there.
Tina looked at Jenny in the rearview, but Jenny looked out her window.
Well, Tina said. I am hungry.
Liz and Apple sat perfectly still. No one said anything, as an exit sign appeared, and then receded. But then Tina was signaling right, and exiting. Liz put her right hand on Apple’s shoulder, and her left hand took Jenny’s hand. They cleared the exit ramp, and up ahead Liz saw the light at the bottom of the ramp turn yellow, and beyond the light, the floating sign of a Shell station, high in the sky like a sun. Liz gripped Apple and Jenny hard, and all three held their pack straps in their hands. The light turned red and Tina braked hard and Liz yelled, GO, and the three of them slammed against the doors, fell out of the car onto the hot blacktop, and ran.
Part Five
Apple lay down on a small patch of grass outside the Shell station, while Jenny and Liz stayed standing, catching their breath. After a minute, Liz got down on her knees next to Apple.
Apple, she said.
Fuck. Apple breathed in and covered her eyes with her palms. You.
Liz looked up at Jenny.
Apple took her palms off her eyes and looked at the clouds moving fast over the sky.
You talk us into doing this like it’s no big deal, like it’s some big fun adventure, Apple said. Liz took Apple’s hand between her two hands, and they looked at each other.
I’m not having fun, Apple said.
Jenny felt she had turned a corner and walked into a room where she didn’t belong. A private dressing room maybe, where pretty girls were dressing. She felt jealous again, for a moment, then she breathed the jealousy out, and it was gone.
Jenny turned back towards the interstate, watched as truck after truck exited, then turned away from the gas station where they were.
There must be a truck stop near here, Jenny said.
I’m not getting in any truck, Apple said.
Of course not, Liz said. Apple lay her head back down in the grass, lolled it from side to side. Jenny slipped off one strap, then the other, let her pack fall to the ground, then sat on top of it. She began taking out her braids, and running her fingers through her long, tangly hair.
Jesus, Jenny said. Then she smirked a little. My sweethearts, Jenny said, grimacing.
My dearhearts, Apple said, from the grass. My larks.
And the two of them laughed, as Liz looked on, first nervously from their chests, then raucously, from their bellies, Apple turning over onto her front, and Jenny falling off her pack and landing, splayed next to her. They laughed like that for a long time, their bodies parallel, their foreheads resting against the dirt.
* * *
They had faced the worst, and they had survived it. Crazy people happened, and could happen to them at any time in random, senseless ways, but there was no use in spending one’s life trying to avoid it. Apple had suffered and that wasn’t fair, but Jenny had protected her. Jenny looked at herself in the truck stop bathroom mirror. She felt fancy. She braided her hair in the French style like Apple had taught her, in Apple’s honor. She took her journal from her pocket and wrote down the lines from the pamphlet. Then she wrote something her father had said once, after listening to a radio special that had moved him to tears.
We are led to the stories we are meant to tell.
In the tent, Apple stared at words on the pages of her book. A woman, a strange woman, had put her hand on Apple. She tingled, with aliveness. They had been tested. She had been violated. But Jenny and Liz had been quick, and she had been quick too, on her feet, when it mattered, and they had emerged basically OK. Apple thought of where she’d been just a year ago, of how deeply she’d bowed down to heroin. All her life she’d carried the belief, small and ludicrous, of being a strong person, of being the kind of person who could roll out of a moving car if it was required of her in order to survive. And now she had done it. Hello, she said to herself. It’s me.
After Jenny and Apple had turned off their headlamps, Liz was still awake in the dark tent. She listened to the sounds of trucks idling, of truckers shouting to one another in the lot, and she willed herself to want to go to West Virginia. When she saw the first light, she stepped out of the tent and vomited into the sunrise, perplexed. As she walked across the parking plaza, she looked at all the trucks parked there in rows. She walked through a lane of trucks with their silver heads and silver antennae facing her on both sides. A few of the trucks were idling with their lights on, and their headlights lit her way towards the truck stop. A few of them honked as she passed, and in their light and their clear blasts into the early morning silence, she felt the weight of being responsible for Jenny and Apple lift off her shoulders. She felt the sweet hard clarity of being alone return to her, greedily fed herself the knowledge that her every choice once again belonged only to her, that every moment was once again hers and hers alone to experience, possess, and retell as it might suit her. She heard her feet hit the blacktop first one and then the other, and the clean simple sound of only her two feet, plucked from the shuffle of the six feet she’d been listening to for the past week, triggered such a sense of joy, such a primal song of relief, that tears formed in a thin membrane over her eyes, but did not fall.
In the truck stop store, Liz bought a pack of cigarettes. She smoked one down, then lit another and smoked it down too.
She found a payphone and called her mother in Massachusetts, but it was her father who answered, of course.
Daddy, she said.
Christ, he said.
She told him where she was and that she was OK, and he was silent a long time. Then he said, I’m getting married on Wednesday. Third time’s the charm. I didn’t know where to send your invitation.
What day is it today? Liz asked.
It’s Thursday.
Liz leaned her back into the glass of the phone booth and looked out at the early morning traffic on I-40, going west, going east.
West would take her over the Blue Ridge Mountains into West Virginia. East would take her to I-95 where she could then get a ride north to Massachusetts. My father, she thought, who I care for not at all.
Liz could imagine the woman her father was marrying if she was anything like the ones he had dated since her mother died. The new wife would be thin and stylish. She’d wear red Givenchy heels and insist on the reception being held at the Four Seasons in Boston. She had never touched, and would never touch, with her life, anything that could ever be called America. She’d look over her wine glass at Liz and ask the question they all asked sooner or later – not just her father’s wives, but all of the women she’d met in the past three years; friends she’d stayed with, artist girls in high heels at the Haight Street photography exhibits, cashiers at the truck stops, waitresses at interstate diners, Deb in Alabama and the other women who’d given her rides – aren’t you scared, out there, on the road all by yourself? Even Apple had asked it. Jenny, Liz realized, was the only one who had never had.
Over a fancy back to school sendoff dinner the August after her freshman year of college, her mother had asked a different question, after listening to Liz talk the whole summer about how her heart was broken over the boy she’d met in Montana:
Elizabeth, her mother had said, exasperated and tired. Don’t you know, when to say when?
I’ll call you back, Liz said, to her father on the phone, and hung up.
Liz walked back to the tent and looked at Apple and Jenny, still asleep. Jenny slept with her knees clutched tightly to her chest, Apple lay on her stomach, arms limp at her sides, elbow side down. It occurred to Liz that she could not protect these two people. Despite her big pack, Liz knew, Jenny was the smarter and the less vulnerable. It occurred to Liz that of the two of them, Jenny would be the one who would be ready to die for this idea. While Apple would run to and fro, trying to get back into life at any cost, Jenny would know better.
* * *
Liz would be having her hair sculpted into a half poof by a Four Seasons Hotel stylist when she’d be summoned to the lobby for a call.
West Virginia police, the smartly dressed receptionist would say, expressionless, handing her the receiver, then placing the phone’s base on the marble countertop.
Elizabeth? a man’s voice would say, breathless, panting. Liz would listen to the static in the connection, to the distance, traveled in wire, between the voice and her.
Yes.
Elizabeth Brundage.
Yes.
You’re alive?
Liz would blink, go to put her hand in the crown of hair, but it would be stiff and feel unattached to her.
Don’t you read the papers? the voice would ask. We’ve been looking everywhere for your body. We’ve been calling you the Third Rainbow Girl.
The detective would tell Liz what they knew, which was nothing. Jenny was likely shot while on her knees, execution style; Apple while turned away, in the back. They were found side-by-side by two local men in a remote field on the top of Viney Mountain, in the early evening.
Liz would thank the detective, and hand the phone back to the smartly dressed receptionist. She’d go back to the salon, where she’d finish getting her hair done. She’d take the elevator up to the eighth floor where she would put on a one shouldered grey crepe de chine dress, so lucky you fit into the sample size!, the mother of her future stepmother would congratulate her. She would stand, on carpeted steps, between the two other bridesmaids in matching grey dresses. There would be an arch made of white lilies and hydrangeas and her father would stand under it with a priest, his head hanging down. The crowd would stand, and her father would raise his head, then turn to Liz, as if to say her name. He would stand still, waiting, as her future stepmother walked, it seemed for miles, towards them. There would be the smell of lilies and hydrangeas and wet greenery. Liz’s father would hold onto the woman’s white-gloved fingertips.
We kneel, the priest would say, for the body of Christ.
Liz would get down on her knees. She would be aware of the space behind her eyes, of the great distance of space between her eyes and her brain. She would be aware of how light the Boston sky still was, how grey.
It would be this detail, that it was still light out when Jenny and Apple died, that would truly slay her, though she wouldn’t know it yet. How could that be? To be shot in the forest when it was not even dark, Liz would think. How little those shots must have mattered to whoever fired them, how sure the shooter must have been that he was safe, what easy targets they must have made, like pretty, dumb deer. What a joke these two women must have seemed, with their big backpacks and sport sandals and maps. What a joke! Liz almost laughed.
But it was still light out! she would think, every time she washed dishes or hiked alone or drove fast in car. How impossible! How absurd! It could not be. And yet, it had been. And yet, it would continue to be.
The veil would be lifted, Liz’s father would be married, again, and there would be a song, and Liz would hear it, finally, as if on endless loop, the detective’s words, would be clobbered by them, out of breath, You’re alive? You’re alive? You’re alive?
* * *
Liz pulled her pack toward her, and heaved it onto her back. She knew that in a few minutes Jenny and Apple would open their eyes. In a few minutes, they would wake up and stretch their arms above their heads, their minds electrically clear, their bodies ready. In a few minutes, they would wake up and head west to the place where people who called themselves Rainbows, who called themselves a family, would gather in the forest, and she was supposed to go with them.