Notes From the Backseat (6 page)

“How far back is Point Reyes Station?” Coop asked me.

Before I could answer, Dannika barked, “There wasn't any town.”

I forced myself to stay calm. She was really starting to get on my nerves. To Coop I said, “Maybe four miles back.”

“I swear to God there was nothing back there.” She sounded close to a meltdown. “The last town I saw was Stinson Beach, and that's not far from San Francisco.”

“Well,” I said, “it's back there. Trust me.”

“Right.” Coop got out of the car. “I guess I'll try to hitch a ride and get us some gas. If worse comes to worst, I can probably walk there and get a ride back.” He leaned against the driver's side and looked at the surfboards. “If we all go, our gear might get stolen. Then again, I hate to leave you two here…”

“Yeah, but think about it,” Dannika said. “We can't all three hitch a ride—it's easier if you just go. Besides, is Gwen going to walk four miles in those shoes?” She shot a bitchy look over her shoulder at my kitten heels. I wanted to tell her if she didn't stop whining I'd happily plunge one of these sharp little heels deep into her heart (provided I could get past the silicone) but I bit my tongue. In some ways, I liked it better when Dannika was a pouty little wench. It made her even easier to hate.

“Kitten?” Coop put his hand on my head. His warm fingers made me want to curl up in his arms—more than that—I would have curled up inside his lungs right then, if it were possible. “What do you want to do?”

As much as I hated the thought of spending the next hour or three stranded on the side of the road with the satanic blonde, I couldn't come up with a better solution. “I guess Dannika's right,” I said. “We'll just stay with the stuff. But be careful about who you get a ride with. There are some freaky people out here.”

“Can't be worse than L.A., right?” He grinned.

“You'd be surprised,” I said.

 

One of the reasons I never go back to Sonoma County with you is because the land itself is polluted by my childhood. When I drive through Sebastopol, it's like navigating a minefield. The deli on the corner reminds me of the time my dad and I went in there for Junior Mints and he left with the salami slicer's phone number. I can't drive past the old ballet studio on Valentine Avenue without thinking of my mother acting rude and tight-lipped with Miss Yee, my favorite teacher there; later, in the car, she blurted out that Daddy was sleeping with “that Chinese slut in the legwarmers.”

I never took lessons there again. How could I concentrate on my pliés, when images of my father doing vague, obscene things under the covers to Miss Yee were burned into the eight-year-old folds of my brain?

Sebastopol is riddled with these traps. Every store and restaurant, every open field and parking lot, every strip mall and house can be traced through an intricate mesh of connections back to some messed-up snapshot from my childhood. I can see the whole town in my mind; it's a vast, convoluted topographical map. Remember Mr. Colwell telling us about the experiment with spiders on acid—how their webs were all wonky and haphazard? The lines of my map are like that—way too complicated and crazy to follow.

It's sad, really, because I know that good things happened here, too. I mean sure, most of the kids at school thought I was a certifiable nutter, which made at least eighty percent of my adolescence excruciating and torturous, but after I met you, everything changed. I was still considered a freak, but when you signed on as my friend I could feel the rest of my life opening up and beckoning me forward. You were an ambassador to the future sent to remind me that there was so much beyond that myopic, claustrophobic little high school. Remember that night when we snuck out and drove your mom's car to Salmon Creek? We stood in the dunes, staring out at the water. The moon was so bright that our shadows were etched into the sand. You sang that Cat Stevens song “Moonshadow,” and I called you a hippie and then we ran down to the crashing waves and closed our eyes and let the mist pour over our faces in the dark while the cold foam licked at our bare toes.

You see what I mean? Get me within county lines and I become a font of nostalgia. Actually, that's not accurate. I become more like AM radio; every once in a while there's a good song that comes soaring out of the static, but mostly it's just a bunch of lame, reactionary crap.

Enough careening down memory lane. Suffice it to say, I'm not happy that this dog-hair infested couch I happen to be writing you from is the epicenter of all those bad memories.

 

So there I was, trapped in the '57 Mercury with my gorgeous nemesis. As I snuck glances at her profile, I couldn't help thinking about the bags of silicone inside her boobs. Do they still use silicone—isn't it like saltwater now? If she had it done eight years ago, what did they use back then? I was overcome with an irrational impulse to ask her about the surgery. What did it feel like, rising from the operating table like a sexed up Frankenstein? Did it take her long to adjust to her new proportions—did she run into things for a few days? What did people say when they first saw her? Were they too polite to comment on her new cleavage or was it so in-your-face they couldn't help but blurt out something inappropriate?

“Sure is dark.” Dannika's voice in the front seat was surprisingly squeaky. “You want to sit up here?”

Was the queen actually inviting me out of the servant's quarters? “I'm okay,” I said.

She turned around to face me. “You're not cramped back there?”

Gee, I've only been wedged between two surfboards and a steamer trunk for eleven hours, now—how kind of you to notice.
“It's not too bad.”

An awkward silence ensued. The barking seals started up again, so far away you could barely hear them. It comforted me, knowing we were close to the water, even though we couldn't see it from here.

“It's getting kind of cold,” she said.

“Yeah,” I replied.

An owl let out a high-pitched, lonely hoot. Dannika shivered and pulled her sweatshirt together at the throat. “Why don't you come up here?” she said. “That way I don't have to turn around when I talk to you.”

It's all about you, isn't it?
I thought, but I went ahead and climbed over the seat into the front. She was sitting dead center and I climbed into the passenger side so she had to scoot over behind the wheel. I couldn't see any reason why I should contend with the steering wheel—not when her surfboard had been dripping cold, waxy blobs on my beautiful car coat for the past two hundred and fifty miles.

Freed now from my confining second-class accommodations, I realized that the car was so immense it was like a mobile couch. All three of us could have ridden in the front, easily. She leaned against the driver's side door and stretched her legs out on the seat. I let my head fall back and looked up at the growing assembly of stars.

You're totally going to force-feed me Zoloft when I tell you this, but for one dizzying second there, I considered what it would be like to kill someone—namely, the leggy bombshell beside me. I mean it's not like I thought it was a good idea. I knew it was sick. But a truck barreled past us just then, a huge logger with a mammoth pile of lumber, and I just thought,
we're alone; I could lure her into the road somehow and act all horrified when she's flattened.

Do you think I should seek professional help?

I was slightly aghast, but at the same time it made me realize something: I really, really want Coop in a way I've never wanted anyone in my life and whoever gets between us better watch herself.

It was chilling, but also weirdly uplifting. In other words, I knew I was in love.

“You always this quiet?” Dannika asked.

“No.” I started wracking my brain for something else to say, but it was a total blank. Actually, it wasn't blank so much as clouded with an impenetrable fog of resentment. I'd been right there, barely two feet from her, all day. Had she shown any interest in making conversation before now? I wasn't going to be her backup entertainment, called onto the stage because her star had gone to get gas.

“So, how did you meet Coop?”

“At the Laundromat,” I said. “Stars Wash-n-Dry. Everything in L.A. is about stars—especially places where no celebrity would be caught dead.”

When I didn't offer anything else, she asked, “What was his pick-up line?”

I chuckled. “It was really crowded and I was waiting for his washer. He left a pair of his boxers in there, so I went over and returned them. I guess I was blushing—he said I was turning pink and could he buy me a beer for my trouble.” I paused.

She must have sensed my hesitation, because she said, “And…?”

I shrugged. “That's it.”

There was no way I was going to tell her the rest—about the delicious, giddy beer buzz we nursed, even though it was only eleven in the morning on a Sunday. How we dropped his laundry off first, then mine, then ate at this random hole-in-the-wall Korean barbecue place we found in Venice. We tried going back there a few weeks ago, but we couldn't even find it. It was like we slipped down an elusive rabbit hole that day, into a land of fleshy noodles, sweet, tender pork, duck that dissolved on the tongue. I was drunk on the afternoon, on his dimples and his cheekbones and the penetrating warmth of his muddy hazel eyes. If she thought I was going to tell her all that, she was crazy.

“We met in the ocean,” she said. “At that beach we stopped at today.” I realized with irritation that her silence wasn't a sign that she was patiently waiting for more details. She'd been recalling her own meeting with Coop.

Again, I wondered very briefly about the best way to get her into the road before the next semi came around the corner.

She laughed softly at her private little memory.

“What?” I prompted, unable to stop myself.

“Oh, nothing. Just—he told me I surfed like a sumo wrestler. I'd plant myself on the board and nothing could throw me off. He nicknamed me Poonha.”

“Poonha?” I echoed weakly.

“After Conrad Poonha—this three hundred-pound Hawaiian surfer guy they show for like thirty seconds in
Endless Summer.
” She lifted her hair with her forearm and flopped it over the car door. “We totally hit it off. For a little while I thought we were in love.” She let out a deep, throaty laugh that sent shivers up my spine. “Shows you what I know.”

I swallowed hard and forced myself to adopt a casual tone. “Did you ever date?”

She tilted her head back and forth and pursed her lips; it was the noncommittal look a doctor gives you when you ask,
is it going to hurt?
“We never really
dated,
” she said. “We just…hung out.”

The ambiguity made me want to throttle her. “Hung out?”

“You know how it is.” She didn't look me in the eye. I wondered how much it would hurt if I took a pair of needle-nose pliers to the diamond twinkling in her nose and yanked as hard as I could. “When you've been friends for ten years, there's not a lot you haven't experienced together.”

“I've known my friend Marla for twelve years.” I cleared my throat. “Of course, we've never had sex.”

“Really?” she said. “Why not?”

I was still puzzling over this comment when I heard the crunch of tires on gravel behind us. I was hoping it was Coop already back with gas, but it seemed unlikely. When I turned around I saw the next best thing, under the circumstances: a CHP officer sizing us up through the windshield of his patrol car.

“Dammit,” Dannika said. “God
dammit.
” Apparently she didn't share my enthusiasm.

“What's wrong?” I whispered.

“It's a cop!”

“Yeah, I know. And we're stranded. Don't we need a cop?”

“Just, don't let him into the trunk, whatever happens,” she said, glancing furtively over her shoulder.

“What do you have back there, a body?”

She shot me a withering look. “Let me do the talking, okay? I know how to handle pigs.” She sat up very straight and gripped the wheel with shaking hands. She looked like a little kid playing “car” in her parents' garage.

“Hello, ladies.” The officer sidled up to the Mercury. His hairline was receding slightly, but still he was mildly handsome in a squeaky-clean lanky way. He had a rather mammoth mole on his left cheek; the overall effect was very John-Boy Walton. “What seems to be the problem?”

Dannika was staring straight ahead, a zombielike expression on her face. In spite of her insistence that she would do the talking, she appeared to be incapable of speech.

“Hi, officer,” I said. “We just ran out of gas. My boyfriend went back to Point Reyes Station to get some.”

“He the big guy hitchhiking, ma'am?”

“That'd be him.” I smiled winningly.

Dannika made a weird sound in her throat. It reminded me of the sound Audrey makes when she's getting ready to hack up a hairball. It was apparent she was trying to suppress it. She was still white-knuckling the steering wheel and staring through the windshield, rigid as a statue.