Pat Boone Fan Club (14 page)

We return to Rome in the Plymouth, while everyone considers options. We pick up my Volkswagen, and I follow my husband back to the Columbus airport to return the rental car. Then we cruise over to Lanett again. The mechanic says he’ll give us $200. We say we’ll take it. No hesitation.

We clean out the rest of our stuff from the camper. Even though, officially, the stool belongs with the camper, my husband takes it, a souvenir. He majestically places it in the backseat of the bug.

Of My Own Accord

I secure my first teaching job, earning enough to buy a new car: a Honda. I sell my Volkswagen.

The man who purchases it is overjoyed beyond all reason. After all, the plastic seats are cracked with straw-like stuffing leaking out. At some point, the
Blaupunkt
was stolen. The left-side molding is a shinier shade of green paint than the rest of the car, a result of a repair job following a minor accident during one of the Houston floods. The right-side molding, from another mishap, remains bashed in, never repaired. The windshield has a small, spiderweb crack. The heater has never worked.

But its original hubcaps shine like only slightly dented moons.

After my parents die, we inherit their Toyota Corolla. We sell the Opel to a woman who wants it solely because her fondest memory of adolescence is driving in her father’s Opel. I write out detailed instructions on how to start the engine. We sell the Ford Escort station wagon as well since, shortly after we purchased it, a drunk driver rear-ended us. Despite five or six trips to the Ford
dealership, the rear window still leaks. Whenever it rains, water drips in around the rubber gaskets, soaking the carpet. The ongoing vapor lock is also problematic.

At the same time that we inherit the Toyota and sell the other cars, we buy our first house. It’s a split-level ranch with a two-stall garage and automatic door opener in the suburbs of Rome. The spotless, well-ordered house, along with the Honda and Toyota, are all clean, reliable, watertight, dependable. So we soon grow bored without the drama and distraction of a monthly breakdown or crisis. How else to explain why, for my husband’s birthday (using money that was a gift from my parents), I buy him a car he covets. It’s a white 1963 Ford Galaxie convertible with Rangoon-red leather seats and a 352-cubic-inch engine.
His
fondest memory of childhood is working on his family’s Galaxie with his father.

This Galaxie, which he happened to notice in a used-car lot, is
not
in mint condition, which, of course, is the appeal. He wants to restore it. He, sometimes accompanied by me, scours salvage yards for replacement parts: grills, bumpers, a toggle switch to activate the hydraulic pump that raises and lowers the convertible top. Followed by a new hydraulic pump itself. Then, of course, the car requires a new white canvas top to go with the toggle switch and pump. Soon one stall of our garage resembles a salvage yard strewn with bumpers, metal molding, lug nuts, levers, spark plugs, cables, knobs. My husband purchases a subscription to
Hemmings Motor News
to search for additional parts. After about a year, he’s replaced over 60 percent of the engine and body. He proudly enters it in classic-car shows, even wins trophies, which he displays on the mantel. By the time we move to Michigan from Georgia, it’s his prized possession. Afraid something might happen to it during the move, he hires a carrier that specializes in classic cars. They ferry the Galaxie in an enclosed van so it won’t be exposed to the elements—or rude, oncoming cars.

My husband and I are in Michigan only about a year before we divorce. We own three cars to divide between us. We decide I’ll keep the Honda, he the Toyota. I also request the Galaxie. I don’t know why. After all, I bought it for him as a present. He’s restored it. I wouldn’t be able to repair it when parts need replacing. Besides, it’s
his
car.

Maybe I only want to spite him, since I know how much he treasures it. He spends time lovingly restoring it, more time than he ever spent with
me
(my italics).

I finally concede it to him, in the end.

After he moves out, I remain in the Victorian house we purchased together. One day, a year or so after he leaves, I discover the pumpkin-colored camper stool in the basement. It glows like warm autumn sunlight amid the dark disorder of boxes, cobwebs, broken furniture, discarded books, old computers, and long-forgotten knickknacks. I wonder if he
meant
to leave this questionable memento. I sit on the stool. The metal legs wobble on the brick floor as if on uneven cobblestones, in a tourist town you drive hours to reach, just to experience history whose worst moments have been so carefully expunged.

Almond Butter in the Ruints

Meteorologists predict a blizzard for March 12. Everyone in Rome, Georgia, scurries to Kroger and Piggly Wiggly to stockpile bottled water, flashlight batteries, food staples—everyone, that is, except me. I ignore all warnings. I pooh-pooh the approaching storm. The entire state, after all, virtually shuts down if so much as two snowflakes drift from the sky. Surely this is another false alarm. Initially, when I moved here from Missouri, I took winter storm warnings seriously. Now I go about my business, anticipating, at most, one-eighth of an inch of snow. Besides, my husband, my cat Quizzle, and I recently moved into our sturdy brick ranch house after living in that log cabin on campus for years. Now we’re snug and secure in our new home.

Starting around midnight, we lie awake in bed. Thunder cracks. Lightning flashes. The ground shakes with the thud of loblolly pines crashing in our yard. The trees, high as telephone poles, are unable to withstand severe winds because of their shallow root system.

“We should go to the basement,” my husband says. He worries a tree will crash onto our roof.

“But in the basement both the roof
and
the first floor could fall on us,” I say, comfortable beneath the quilt.

Quizzle, usually a calm and fearless cat, hunkers between us in bed.

The next morning we stare out the glass sliders in the kitchen. About seven loblollies, huge root bulbs exposed, crisscross the snowy yard. Luckily, all crashed to the ground away from the house, though they severed power and phone lines.

We’re without heat and electricity. No working flashlights. No phone. No logs to burn in the fireplace. The South, lacking snow-removal equipment, can’t plow streets, now several feet deep in snow. We don’t even own a snow shovel. Plus, we’re probably the only people in the state out of food.

We sit at the kitchen table bundled in jackets and caps eating almond butter on crackers for breakfast. Lunch. Dinner. When we run out of crackers, we dip a teaspoon into the jar and lick. I don’t remember whether I bought the almond butter or whether it was a present, but it has languished on various shelves for years, continuously moved from house to house, refrigerator to refrigerator. Not that I’m much of a cook—a fact that contributes to our present lack of food—but I’ve never used, let alone seen, a recipe that actually calls for almond butter. Yet since it’s relatively expensive, and packaged in such a cute jar, I’ve never thrown it away.

Our only means of communication is a shortwave radio belonging to my husband. Miraculously, it has a set of working batteries.

Hour after hour, Romans who still have phone service call the radio station. They share their storm emergencies, anecdotes, and general feelings. Can anyone provide an elderly woman with a ride to Floyd County Hospital? Can anyone stop the snow and clear the streets for a young woman supposed to get married today? Can anyone airlift in a prescription of Prozac? Can anyone obtain kerosene for a heater for someone’s grandmother?

Most calls concern food stockpiled in refrigerators and freezers. Now, lacking electricity, it’s being ruined . . . or, as it sounds to my Northern-Yankee ears, “ruint.” Chickens, roasts, deer and rabbit meat, ice cream, sweet potato pies. All ruint.

“How can food go bad when their houses are cold as a freezer?” I ask.

My husband glares at me since I convinced him the storm wouldn’t be, well, a storm. He’d suggested we purchase supplies like firewood or kerosene or, at least, groceries.

“But five hundred years!” We’d just heard on the radio that this type of freak storm occurs only once every half millennium. “Plus, it’s March,” I add. “What are the odds?”

In between reports of ruint food, we learn that in this storm near-hurricane-force winds gusted over fifty-five miles per hour. It slammed most of the East Coast as far south as Cuba. A disorganized area of low pressure that formed in the Gulf of Mexico merged with an arctic high-pressure system in the midwestern Great Plains. Both swarmed into the midlatitudes because of an unusually steep southward jet stream. In Georgia temperatures plummeted from sixty-five degrees to the teens in a matter of hours. Thundersnow, it’s called on the radio. A cyclonic blizzard. A Nor’easter.

I just bought twenty-five dollars of stew meat to get us through the storm. Now it’s ruint.

“See,” I say. “If we’d stockpiled groceries, it’d all be ruint.”

“Bread? Bottled water?” my husband says.

“We’ve got water.” I clomp over to the sink in my boots and turn on the faucet.

I run the hot water till it’s steaming. I fill up a mug and drink it.

Then I refill it, holding the steam close to my face. Who knows how long the water in the heater will stay hot? Quizzle jumps on my lap when I sit down again. I press the mug against her fur before tucking her under my jacket. She purrs.

Anyone with pickups and chainsaws, Georgia Power’s looking for folks to help cart logs from downed power lines.

My husband spends the day grading student papers. I also have a batch of freshman essays to grade, but I’m too cold to remove my gloves, too cold to grip a pencil. After being unemployed for several years (when I quit my job at the public library), I returned to school for an advanced degree. I now teach as an adjunct at the community college.

I remain in the chair, Quizzle on my lap, seemingly incapable of movement. I just stare out the sliders at the snow and fallen
loblollies. I wish, at least, we had television. I hate to miss episodes of my favorite show,
Mystery Science Theater 3000
.

All
NASCAR
races in Atlanta are postponed until . . .

All classes cancelled . . .

I should be pleased by this news. And I am, but only partially. Most of my students, in this rural Georgia county, are women, and most are the first members of their families to continue their education past high school. I admire and miss them. At times they good-naturedly poke fun at what they call my “Yankee accent.” I start saying “y’all” to humor them, to fit in.

A few months ago one of the students asked why I liked teaching English. “I guess I like words,” I said, having finally recovered from typing my husband’s indecipherable book on ekphrasis.

Marcee, a quiet student but a good writer, came up to me after class. “I like words, too,” she said, her voice low. “But I never heard anyone ever say that before.”

A month later she switched her major from dental hygiene to English.

Previously, I taught at another college here in Rome, one belonging to the Southern Baptist Convention. I attended church services on Wednesday evenings. I held hands with colleagues as we prayed over meals. Before Christmas break, I sat in the chapel scented with candle wax and deep-red poinsettias. The choir sang Christmas carols and hymns, warming the windows overlooking a gray winter sky.
Loving God, help us remember the birth of Jesus, that we may share in the song of the angels.
A Christmas tree, decorated with gold-colored crosses, silvery stars, and white lights, shone at the college entrance.

But the job was temporary. Maybe if I still taught there I’d have believed in the fury of this storm, a storm of biblical proportions, instead of ignoring the warnings.

Saturday night, before dark, I search the kitchen drawers for matches. I find an old matchbook from Thorne’s restaurant in
Galveston, hunter green with white lettering. The cover is bent, the sticks crumpled, but I manage to light a few candles. Flickering flames reflect in the glass doors leading to the deck. I once read that, back before electricity, mirrors were frequently hung in houses in order to multiply light.

My husband carries Quizzle down the hall to the bedroom. I remain by the kitchen sliders, long past midnight. In the glass, my face grays, ghostly, surrounded by licks of fire. As my eyes adjust to darkness, slivers of moonlight whiten the snow . . . snow blanketing all of Georgia, the whole East Coast.

The last time I felt this cold was last August, a Friday evening in the bar at the Holiday Inn. The room was over air conditioned and frigid. Condensation formed on windows overlooking the parking lot, blurring the night. My husband and I were with a group of friends from his college. We all drank Long Island iced tea: vodka, tequila, rum, gin, triple sec, sour mix, a splash of cola. A variation: white crème de menthe, a splash of real iced tea.

An Elvis impersonator.

I danced with a man to “Suspicious Minds.” This man, who was not my husband, wore a black shirt and white tie, faux tough guy.

I barely noticed my husband or what he was or wasn’t doing.

The air conditioning chilled my skin, to say nothing of the layers slowly numbing beneath the surface.

The bar was also packed with out-of-towners sentenced to a Holiday Inn on business.

Why did I think that the scent of chilled air, the scent of skin sweating alcohol, was romantic? That an Elvis impersonator, whose career apex would be chain motels on the outskirts of oblivion, was romantic?

Or was I the one on the outskirts of oblivion?

Who was I impersonating that night? Who am I now?

I glanced up. My husband sat at a round bar table, beside the window, gripping his drink. He wasn’t smiling. He didn’t seem
to hear the music. His face was expressionless, his reflection in the glass, vague. He seemed to be staring at me . . . or, no, staring past me, or through me. How could he see me when I was barely able to see myself? I wanted to go to him. I wanted to apologize, apologize for dancing with someone else all night, apologize for not warning him, before we married, that I’d be a bad wife. A hollow wife. For not warning him that, in my previous marriage, I’d run off with a man whose biggest attraction was that he drove a blue convertible.

But I didn’t.

When Elvis’s simulacrum crooned “Always on My Mind,” I nuzzled my face against the neck of the black-shirt-and-white-tie man. I closed my eyes so I no longer saw my husband or so, magically, he—no one—could see me. But in my transparency, surely no one saw me anyway.

Now, outside, the night is still, quiet. No cars, snowplows, or people. The houses surrounding mine are equally dark.

Only disembodied voices on the radio calling for help, recognition, comfort.

The radio itself is like the mother ship, the heartbeat of Rome, a solitary light burning in the universe.

And I realize why people prepare for storms, even as no one can ever be fully prepared: the camaraderie of gathering in the supermarket to stockpile groceries; the camaraderie when plans fail, so neighbor helps neighbor.

But I stockpiled nothing, nothing to ease me through the storm.

All night, the radio spools out voices. I don’t turn it off.

My pork chops are ruint.

It’s an act of God.

Drifts of snow press against the sliding door.

If only my telephone worked, I could call into the radio station with my own emergency:
My marriage is buried under cataracts of snow. I am encased in ice. I am ruint.

I remain in the kitchen, hungry and cold, gripping the jar of almond butter on the Sabbath—a totem, a talisman, an artifact—among my Southern Baptist neighbors. Centuries hence, I will be discovered by archaeologists in this same position, beneath slabs of ice in the ruints of Rome.