The Leisure Seeker: A Novel (12 page)

“John.” I walk as fast as I can over to him and throw my arms around him. “Jesus Christ, John.” I’m ready to start bawling right there at the Dairy Igloo. I squeeze John as hard as I can.

“Ella?”

I hold on to him for dear life. “I need you right now. I need you to stay with me. We don’t have that much time, John.”

“I don’t know what you mean, Ella.”

I pull back from him and look him straight in the eyes. “Honey, you scared the dickens out of me.” People from the front of the Dairy Igloo are starting to look over at us now. I lower my voice.

John licks at his cone, looks at me like this is no big thing at all. “I just decided to go for a walk.”

“Oh, you just decided to go for a walk?” I am trying not to get mad now. I don’t want to yell in front of all these people. “John, do you have any idea how to get back from here? Do you know where you’re going at all?”

He points back the way we came. “Back that way.”

“Give me that thing,” I say, snatching the ice cream cone from his hand. I give it a lick. It’s sweet and cold and tastes wonderful and it makes me start to cry. I sit down on the bench and can’t seem to stop crying.

John puts his arm around me, gathers me close. “What are you crying for?”

“Nothing,” I say.

Just then, Terry steps from his truck and approaches us.

“Who’s this?” says John, suspiciously.

It takes me a moment to compose myself. I hand John back his ice cream cone. Snuffling, I pull a tissue from my sleeve, blow my nose. “This is Terry, the young man who helped me find you.”

“Hmph,” grunts John. He gives Terry a look like he might give a convicted felon, which Terry may be, but I doubt it.

I blow my nose again. “Terry,” I say, my voice cracking, “may we buy you an ice cream?”

He nods timidly. I pull out a twenty from my purse. “Could you get me one, too?”

Terry flashes a sad smile at me, far too sad for someone his age. I sit there next to John, my arm around his waist.

A few minutes later, Terry comes back with two chocolate-vanilla swirls and a handful of my change. I take my cone, then close his hand around the bills and coins.

The glove is off now and I can finally read the tattoo on his right hand. It says “
F U C K
.” Now I understand what’s on his other hand.

I know just what he means.

That night, we go to bed early—no cocktail hour, no slide show, no TV. I make us some grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup, then give us each a Valium. I hate those things, but tonight I need to be sure that John is going to sleep. I force myself to stay up until I can hear him snoring, then I lock the door and bolt it shut. I lie down next to him so he’ll have
a harder time getting up without waking me up. Tonight I’m taking no chances.

When I finally allow myself to relax, I’m not tired anymore. I start thinking about the kids. I meant to give Cindy a call today, but forgot in all the excitement. I think about Cindy’s job at Meijer’s Thrifty Acres and how hard she works, how these big stores take advantage of their employees. So many extra hours and no extra pay. I think of how tired I know she is, getting up at 4:00
A.M.
every day. Then I start thinking about my old job, the one I had when we first got married. It was just a salesgirl position at Winkleman’s, but I liked being around people all day, loved the fashions, and we sure needed the money. When Cindy came along, I quit, thinking that some day I’d go back, but it never happened. John wouldn’t have gotten on his high horse about having a “working wife,” but it was assumed that I would be there to raise the kids and that was fine with me.

As the years passed, I would think about going back to work now and then, but there was always plenty to do around the house. I remember seriously considering it one day when Kevin was a toddler and being an absolute terror around the house. (He would eat everything in sight—bugs, cleaning supplies, plants, medicine—whatever it was, it went into his mouth. The poison control center knew me by name.) That child ran me ragged. And no sooner would I get him settled than Cindy would come home from school to get him all riled up again. Having a job would have been nice around that time.

I never meant to bury my talent in a napkin. The fact was, I never really knew if I had a talent for anything, except for
being a wife and mother. I do know I loved doing the displays at the store. Sometimes I’d even get a chance to do a window. I always had a flair for that sort of thing—putting colors together, fabrics, textures, all of it. At the store, everyone was always pleased with what I did. Mr. Biliti, the manager, a thin man with a moustache and a little dandruff problem, always told me what a good job I had done. I remember his disappointment when I announced I was pregnant. He smiled and congratulated me, and immediately began to ignore me. Before long, it was like I didn’t even exist. He knew what would happen. He worked in a women’s store, after all.

To be truthful, I rarely thought about any of them after I left. I was happy to be where I was, happy to be a mom, with a house and a husband. And John was a good husband. We made a good home for our children. We both came from homes ruled by tyrants and adulterers and martyrs, where we lived with constant arguments and beatings, so we decided that whatever our parents did, we would do the opposite. All in all, it was a pretty good plan.

We always looked at our marriage as a team. Neither one of us is more important. I never waited on John hand and foot, like some women. If he wanted a sandwich, he could jolly well get up and make it himself. We have always been very modern that way. This is marriage, not indentured servitude.

Which is why his remarks lately about the house being “his house” and everything else being purchased with “his money” have hurt me so. I know it’s the disease talking, that people
like him start getting that way about money and such. Still, it used to be that he would never say anything like that to me.

I’m not even sure he remembers that we’ve had two houses, one in Detroit before the one in Madison Heights. We, like most everyone else like us, moved out of Detroit a few years after the ’67 riots. It broke my heart to leave that house. We lived there almost twenty years. But things changed, neighborhoods changed. White people were scared, moving out by the swarm. There was blockbusting, real estate people knocking on your door telling you that “they” were moving into your neighborhood, spreading stories about break-ins and robberies. All that talk. That talk made me scared to walk around my own neighborhood.

When I grew up, we lived on Tillman Street in the city, in an area that was very poor. Black folks lived on our block with us and it didn’t matter then. We had everyone on our street—Bulgarians; Irish; Czech; lots of Poles; a Jew; some French (the Millers, who were all thieves); and a black man, Mr. Williams, who lived with his daughter, Zula Mae; even a mixed-race couple, a white woman and a black man. It didn’t matter because we were all poor. We all owned nothing and all lived peacefully.

Everything just seemed to fall apart after the riots. Coleman Young was elected mayor and made it pretty clear that he didn’t like white people. He told us all to hit Eight Mile Road and keep going. Before long, everyone I knew, my sisters and brother, all our neighbors and friends, moved out of Detroit.
Except us. Again, I lived down the street from black folks and I told myself that it wouldn’t matter, but it was different this time. We were made to feel that Detroit was their city now. I guess we weren’t so used to being the minority. I didn’t want to leave my home. I loved that house. But we left it.

It still breaks my heart to see what happened. So many slums and abandoned buildings. Michigan Central Station, the National Theatre, J.L. Hudson’s, the Statler, the Michigan Theatre, all destroyed or left to rot. Now I hear white people are starting to move back into the city. Buildings are being renovated. There are new condos and developments and office complexes. Things are changing again. I don’t know what to think. What is white has become black, what is black becomes white. And these days, these lingering days, John and I live in between, in a grayworld where nothing seems really real, and the places that were once so important to us are forever gone.

I have to go to the bathroom, but I don’t want to get up yet. I just want to lie here for a few moments more. I wonder what happened to all of them at Winkleman’s. Most of them were older than me. They are dead now, I’m sure of that, just like almost all of our friends, the ones who moved with us from the city to the suburbs. The Jillettes, the Nears, the Meekers, the Turnblooms, almost all gone, except for a straggling widow here and there.

You worry about parents, siblings, spouses dying, yet no
one prepares you for your friends dying. Every time you flip through your address book, you are reminded of it—
she’s gone, he’s gone, they’re both gone
. Names and numbers and addresses scratched out. Page after page of gone, gone, gone. The sense of loss that you feel isn’t just for the person. It is the death of your youth, the death of fun, of warm conversations and too many drinks, of long weekends, of shared pains and victories and jealousies, of secrets that you couldn’t tell anyone else, of memories that only you two shared. It’s the death of your monthly pinochle game.

Know this: even if you’re like us and still doddering around above ground, someone out there from your past is probably pretty sure that you’re dead by now.

At 4:23
A.M.,
I wake from my usual flimsy slumber to find John standing over me, lips knitted over teeth, forehead veined with rage. I think I’ve mentioned that sometimes he isn’t able to distinguish his dreams from reality. Sometimes he wakes up and doesn’t know where he is or who he is. And he’s mad as Hades about it.

“John, what’s wrong?” I say, sitting up in bed.

He glares at me, mouth open, his breath ragged and phlegmy.

“John, what is
wrong
?” I say, noticing something glinting in his hand. I thought, this is it, he’s finally gone round the bend. “What do you have there? What are you thinking? You were just having a dream.”

“No, I’m not,” he growls. “I’m awake. Where are we? This isn’t home. Where have you taken me?”

“John. This is our camper. We’re on vacation, remember? I’m your wife. I’m Ella.”

“You’re not Ella.” He barks it at me, between clenched teeth.

“Of course I’m Ella. I know who I am. I’m your wife, I’m Ella.”

His eyes soften a little as if what I’m saying is starting to make some sense to him. “What are you holding there, John?”

He holds out his hand so I can see what he’s got. It’s a knife.

A butter knife.

“Give me that, you horse’s ass.” I’m ready to smack him one by now.

When I call him that, it seems to prove to him that I am indeed Ella. He hands me the knife and I feel something on the blade, something sticky.

“Were you making a sandwich, John?” I take a closer look at him.

“No.”

“Then how come there’s peanut butter on your face?” I take a tissue from my pocket, wet it at my mouth, and wipe his upper lip.

“I don’t know.”

“Good Christ. Come to bed, John.”

It’s not the first time this has happened. The last time at
home, he just shook me awake clutching the neckline of my nightgown. The time before that was the scary one. He was holding a claw hammer and he kept banging his nightstand, demanding to know where he was.

Right after that, I started having a hard time sleeping. It’s not just from being afraid of my husband. It doesn’t upset me to think about dying. What upsets me is the idea of John being alone after his spell passes. The idea of one of us without the other.

The morning sky is annoyingly blue. John wakes up quiet but chipper, whereas I am grouchy as hell. We have toast and tea and oatmeal, meds, then pack up and move out. Getting back on the road is a welcome relief. I decide to forget about yesterday and concentrate on what’s ahead. We have a long pass through the panhandle of Texas ahead of us, at least one hundred sixty miles.

The landscape is flat and uncheering—scalded rock and cracked earth, scabbed with wiry bush. Just to be on the safe side, I make John stop to fill up the Leisure Seeker. After I put in our credit card and get John started, I visit the ladies’ room, then buy us snacks and two big bottles of water. (I hate spending money on water, but it makes me feel better to have them.)

John is still filling up when I get back. I think he hasn’t been pressing the nozzle trigger beyond a trickle. He smiles at me as I walk toward the van. He’s wearing a big golf hat with the American flag on it that he must have found somewhere.

“We all set, El?” he says through the open window after I climb in.

“Set as we’re gonna be,” I say, surprised to hear that name again. It’s been years since John has called me “El.” These are the things the disease steals from you, one by one, the little familiars, the details that make that person feel like home. These are also the things that this trip is stirring back up to the surface again. I like that.

The nozzle snaps itself off. John hooks it back on the pump, then opens the van door. Our credit receipt curls out from a slot on the pump, quivers in the wind, then flits away. We are not worrying about such things. John settles in his captain’s chair, beams at me, gives my knee a squeeze.

“Hey lover,” he says, looking pleased, though most of what he’s feeling there is fat and titanium. I don’t mind telling you that just then, my heart soars.

I smile back, in a better mood now, and glad to see my old man. “Someone’s full of piss and vinegar today,” I say.

He pats my knee and starts the van. We need this after yesterday.

We decide to forgo the “Devil’s Rope” Barbed Wire Museum in McLean because it sounds like it could be the silliest museum in the world. Not long after, we pass a little old-fashioned Phillips 66 gas station with orange pumps and a milk-bottle-shaped chimney. Like a lot of the things that people have restored on this road, it doesn’t actually work, but it looks good.