Things I Want to Say (6 page)

Still, for a gal who hadn’t traveled much, I was having fun. Amish country was exactly as I’d always pictured it—black horse-drawn buggies plodding along in the slow lane, women in bonnets and aprons selling fresh produce and colorful quilts from the front porches of neat white frame farmhouses and barefoot children in old-fashioned clothes playing in the fields.

Everything looked like a picture postcard, and many of the businesses continued the Amish theme. Farmer John Real Estate, Plain and Fancy Farm Restaurant, Countryside Apartments.

“It’s more like a theme park than a town,” I said as Alice maneuvered the truck across four spaces in the back lot of the Lancaster Econo Lodge.

“I think that’s why I liked it so much when I was here on my honeymoon,” she said. “It was Williamsburg without the boring guides.”

We ate dinner at a farmhouse-themed restaurant. A strapping German waitress who had probably never bothered to count a calorie in her life brought out steaming bowls of mashed potatoes, beans, country ham and sausage, sauerkraut, creamed corn and a whole loaf of homemade bread. My mouth watered, but I resolutely allowed myself tiny helpings of the least-fattening choices.

I noticed Alice didn’t eat much, either. “Don’t hold back on my account,” I told her.

“Oh, it’s not you.” She laid her fork across her half-full plate and pushed it away. “I still don’t have my appetite back from the chemo.”

“How long has it been?” I asked. For some reason—maybe her hair—I’d assumed Alice had completed her treatments months, maybe even a year or more, ago.

“About three months now.” She sat up straighter. “But I’m doing great. And I’d be a fool to complain about losing the urge to overeat.”

“Yeah.” Twisted as it is, I could see the positives in her situation. When I was the most depressed about being fat, I used to fantasize about developing some mysterious but nonfatal illness that would cause the excess pounds just to melt away.

How many times have you heard someone—almost always a woman—say something like “Yeah, I puked up my guts for three days with the flu. But the good news is, I lost five pounds.”

No telling what our waitress thought about all the food we left uneaten, but we left her a big tip and walked back to the motel. We’d rented a room with two double beds to save money.

Alice kicked off her shoes and crawled onto the bed closest
to the door. “When Bobby and I were here, we stayed at a bed-and-breakfast,” she said. “The Farmhouse Inn or something. It really was a room in someone’s farmhouse.” She giggled. “We had to show them our marriage license to prove we really were married.”

“Is the place still here?” I kicked off my own shoes and pulled my hair back into a ponytail.

“Who knows? I didn’t see the name in the tourist brochures I ordered.”

I lay down on the floor and began doing leg lifts.

“How can you do that on a full stomach?” Alice asked.

“Define full.” I rolled over onto my other side.

“I thought you weren’t supposed to exercise too close to bedtime.” She aimed the remote at the television and switched it on, but kept the sound muted.

I stared up at the image of a serious female news anchor narrating video showing a burning house. “I usually try to exercise earlier in the day, but some days that doesn’t happen.” I rolled onto my back, arms overhead, enjoying the stretch. “Better late than never.”

“I still can’t believe you lost a hundred pounds. That’s amazing.”

“It was the hardest thing I ever did.” I hugged my knees to my chest, stretching my lower back. “In fact, if I’d known just how hard it would be, I might not have ever started.”

“Not even knowing how great the results would be?” She stretched out on her stomach and looked over the edge of the bed at me. “I mean it. You look great.”

“Reasonably good with clothes on. Naked, my boobs are somewhere around my navel and my butt looks like a sharpei.” I began doing sit-ups, counting in my head, trying not to grunt with each lift.

Alice watched me for a while, silent. I was up to seventy-five when she spoke again. “Still, it must have felt fantastic when you met your goal,” she said.

I lay back, panting. When both my breathing and my heart rate had slowed a little, I said, “It did. But it was scary, too.”

“Change is scary.”

I hugged my arms across my chest. “I’d never been a normal size before—not since I was a little girl. I not only had to find a whole new wardrobe, I had to learn a different way of relating to people.”

“You mean people treated you differently once you were thinner?”

“I mean I acted different with them. I never realized before I lost the weight how much I used my fat as a shield. Now when people look at me, I feel as if they are seeing the
real
me—the one I’d been hiding. It was terrifying.”

Alice rolled over onto her back and stared at the ceiling. Neither of us said anything for a long while. The picture on the television switched to an ad for trucks. Brawny men in jeans and tight T-shirts raced big black trucks through mud puddles and over rocks.

“I really admire you,” Alice said, her voice thick. “Maybe having you along on this trip, some of your courage will rub off on me.”

“You don’t need my courage.” I sat up and looked at her. “You were never afraid of anything when we were girls.”

“I’m afraid now.”

“What are you afraid of?”

“Do you believe in karma?”

A chill washed over me and I rubbed my arms. “Like things we did in some other life coming back to haunt us?”

“I’m talking about things we did in
this
life coming back to haunt us.” She sat up and pulled the bedspread around her, the quilted chintz billowing around her like a tacky hoop skirt.

I climbed up on the bed beside her. “I think,” I said slowly,
“sometimes things just happen and there’s nothing we can do about them. Everybody makes mistakes. It’s part of being human.”

“But we can choose. And when we make the wrong choices, maybe we have to pay.” She watched me out of the corner of her eye, the way you watch a wild animal you know you can’t trust.

“I still don’t think you could have done anything that bad.” Even to me, the protest sounded weak. After all, a lot can happen in twenty years. The girl who’d been my friend possibly didn’t even exist anymore.

Alice smoothed both hands down the folds of bedspread that fanned out from her waist. “When I was twenty-nine, I met a man. A friend of Bobby’s. They played golf together sometimes, worked for the same company, though not in the same department. We met at some charity fundraiser or other. Bobby had begged off coming with me. I think he had to work. Anyway, I was there by myself and I met this man. Travis. The minute his eyes met mine and he smiled at me, it just took my breath away.”

She pressed her palm flat to her chest and her cheeks turned pink, as if even the memory of that evening made her heart beat faster. “It was electric. That’s such a romance-novel cliché, but it really was like sparks arcing between us.”

“You fell in love?”

She frowned. “That’s what I called it. I couldn’t seem to stop myself.” She held out her hands, palms up. “I don’t know if it was hormones or boredom or having married so young or some flaw in my character, but I saw him every chance I could. Soon I couldn’t bear to be away from him for even a few hours. I was reckless.”

“And Bobby found out?” I asked.

She nodded. “I think I knew in the back of my head I’d get caught, but I didn’t care. I think I
wanted
Bobby to find out. To force me to make a decision.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“He gave me an ultimatum. He told me I had to choose. I suppose he was sure I’d pick him, but I’d convinced myself I needed Travis more than I needed anything else in my life. So I left.”

“You left?” The words sounded so stark. So final.

She nodded. “I told him I’d sign whatever agreement he wanted and I left. Travis lost his job a few weeks after that. I’m sure Bobby had a hand in that. We moved to Chicago and two years later he left me for a woman he worked with.”

She bowed her head, tears making dark splotches on the bedspread.

I reached out and touched her arm. “How awful for you.”

She shook her head. “I remember thinking at the time that I’d gotten exactly what I deserved. As bitter as I felt at his betrayal, it was probably nothing compared to what Bobby must have gone through.”

“Did you try to go back to Bobby? To ask forgiveness?”

“I couldn’t.” The word was a whisper. She took a deep, shaky breath and offered me a too-bright smile. “Anyway, you see what I mean about karma. I figured I’d paid my debt when Travis left. That things were even. Later, when I found out I had cancer, I wondered if I was being punished further.”

“Alice, I don’t believe God punishes people like that.”

“No? But what if all that guilt I’d carried around all these years transformed into that tumor? Sort of a physical manifestation of the emotions that had been eating at me for years anyway.”

“I don’t believe that,” I said again. “If that were true, there would be even more sick people than there already are.”

“Maybe you’re right. But it’s worth thinking about.” She looked at me, calmer now. Almost serene even, the lines around her eyes and mouth smoothed out, some of the pain
gone from her eyes. “It’s one reason I want to go back to California—to clear my conscience. No sense taking a chance on a recurrence of the tumor.”

“I’m glad you’re going back if you think it will help you feel better.” I patted her arm again. “And I’m glad I’m coming with you.”

“If nothing else, I figure this will be a fresh start,” she said. “It’s what I need.”

I could use a fresh start, too,
I thought as I watched her untangle herself from the blankets and walk to the bathroom. Sure, I’d told myself I was flying back to Virginia to impress my old friends and reconnect with the man of my dreams, but would anyone who was truly satisfied with her life place much importance on either of those things?

The truth was, I was a thirty-eight-year-old single woman who had lived all her life within shouting distance of her older sister. I had a job that sounded exciting but really wasn’t, no truly close friends and a new body I didn’t know what to do with.

I wanted a different life from the one I had, even though I didn’t yet know how to define those dreams. But I had to start somewhere, and this seemed as good a place as any. I liked Alice’s idea of asking forgiveness and healing old wounds, even if the thought of figuring out which of my sins needed forgiving—and which wounds I needed to heal—made me a little queasy.

When Frannie and I first moved to Hollywood, we rented a tiny Airstream trailer in a mobile-home park within sight of the famous Hollywood sign. Frannie went to beauty school during the day and worked nights as a switchboard operator at MGM.

I went to school, came home and baked brownies and lay across my bed, making halfhearted attempts to do my homework. Mostly what I did was daydream.

In my fantasies, I took glamorous trips around the world, often in the company of handsome men or with groups of friends—both things were noticeably absent from my life in those days.

Frannie was never part of those dream trips. How ironic that I waited another twenty-two years to actually go anywhere without her.

True, I wasn’t in Morocco or Luxembourg, and there were no rich, dashing men in sight, but Alice and Amish country offered the same escape I’d craved all those years ago. I figured I was starting small. This year, Pennsylvania. Next year, Paris!

After breakfast the following morning Alice decided she wanted to try to find the place where she’d spent her honeymoon. “I think I remember the road it was on,” she said. “I want to see if the house is still there.”

We set out down a winding two-lane county road, slowing behind the occasional black Amish buggy. The scenery was straight out of a picture book—neat white farmhouses set back from rolling fields, draft horses grazing in pastures, laundry flapping on clotheslines in backyards.

“Briar Rose Lane.” Alice read the wooden sign nailed to a fence corner. “I think this is it.” She slowed and turned the big truck onto an even narrower road. We crept along while she studied the various houses we passed. “This is the one,” she declared at last, stopping in front of a sprawling white house. “I remember the fence in front and that big oak tree with the swing.”

“It looks like a private home,” I said. As I spoke, a woman in a blue dress and white cap came out onto the porch and looked toward us.

“I think it is, now,” Alice said. “It was then, too, but there was a little sign on a post out here that said they had rooms for overnight guests.”

I looked at the woman on the porch again. “What do you want to do?” I asked. “If we keep sitting here, she’s liable to call the cops. She might think we’re casing the place.”

“I’d kind of like to look inside.” Alice glanced at me and shrugged. “Guess I’m feeling nostalgic.”

I thought of my drive out to my childhood home in Ridgeway and wondered if Alice felt the same kind of pull. Except I’d had no desire to enter the house on Amaranth Avenue.

Instead of calling the police, the woman sent one of her children out to talk to us. The boy looked to be about nine. He was barefoot, dressed in too-short black pants and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. His thick blond hair fell over his forehead and he stood on tiptoe to look into the cab of the truck. “Do you ladies need some help?” he asked.

“Hi.” Alice smiled at him. “My name is Alice and this is
my friend Ellen. When I was younger, I stayed in this house on my honeymoon. I was in the neighborhood and wanted to see the place again.”

The boy glanced back toward the house, his lower lip jutting out as he processed this information. Then he looked back at us. “Do you want to come in?” he asked.

“We’d love that. Thank you.” Alice was out of the truck and standing beside the boy before I’d even unfastened my seat belt. I followed her and the boy up the long drive to the porch where the woman waited.

“These ladies want to see the house,” the boy said.

The woman folded her hands across her stomach and studied us with a worried expression. “The house is not for sale,” she said.

“Oh, I don’t want to buy it.” Alice offered up another of her hundred-watt smiles. “I’m on my way to California—I’m going to be living there. But twenty years ago I spent my honeymoon here. The people who owned the house then rented rooms and my husband and I stayed here.”

Some of the stiffness went out of the woman. “Yes, I remember hearing the Stolzes sometimes rented rooms.” She looked toward the end of the porch. “You would have stayed in this bedroom over here, is that right?”

“Yes. I remember the door onto the porch.” Alice led the way to the white-painted door. The Amish woman opened it and ushered us in. “My oldest sons sleep here now, but you are welcome to look.”

There was nothing remarkable about the room, except that it was much neater than I’d expected a teenage boy’s room to be. A pair of maple twin beds shared space with a simple desk and an old-fashioned chest of drawers. Simple white curtains at the windows and patchwork quilts on the beds were the only decoration.

“When Bobby and I stayed here, there was a big white iron bed,” Alice said. She stood in the middle of the room,
a soft expression on her face. “It was spring, and we left the window open at night. I remember the smell of jasmine.”

“The jasmine is still there,” the Amish woman said. “And the white bed is in my daughters’ room.”

Alice nodded, as if satisfied to know these icons of her past still existed. “Thank you for letting me look,” she said, and led the way back onto the porch.

“You were happy in your marriage?” the Amish woman asked, her tone puzzled, perhaps because she’d noted the lack of a wedding ring on Alice’s finger and the absence of a husband.

“We were happy for a long time,” Alice said. Her eyes still held a dreamy look, as if she was once more that child bride, ignorant of everything to come in her life. “Thank you,” she said again, and descended the steps to the driveway.

I nodded to the Amish woman and her son, and took off after Alice. Neither of us said anything as she turned the truck around. When we were out of sight of the house, I said, “Is there anywhere else you’d like to visit? Anything that was special to you during your honeymoon?”

She shook her head. “No. That house was the only place.” She glanced at me, and some of the sadness returned to her expression. “I just wanted to see, one more time, a place where I’d been really, truly happy.”

Her words made me ache. “You can be happy again,” I said. “Now that you’ve beat the cancer and you’re going to Ojai to start over. You could meet someone and…”

She held up her hand to stop my babbling. “I’ll never be happy in that way again—the kind of happiness that comes from being so innocent and untouched by tragedy of any kind. It’s something only young people can know. And we’re too ignorant then to know how precious it is.”

I nodded, understanding what she was saying, but unsure if I’d ever known the emotions she was talking about.
Even
children can be touched by tragedy,
I thought.
And yet, they’re often happy in spite of it.

Maybe that was the real test: to learn to be content in spite of our troubles. To find the good in the midst of all the bad.

The next morning we hit the road again, this time with me behind the wheel. Though I was a little nervous about piloting the big truck, I was also secretly thrilled. There’s nothing like sitting above the rest of the traffic to make you feel a little superior and powerful.

“I always wondered what it would be like to be a long-haul trucker,” Alice said as we sped west on Route 283. “Or one of those people who live in a motorhome, always traveling from place to place. In a way, it’s very romantic and all, but I think I’d miss having a real home.” Funny word,
home
. Simple, yet charged with meaning. “I’m not sure I’ve ever had a real home,” I said. “Not really.”

“What do you mean? Of course you did. You lived in the same house for the first sixteen years of your life, and you’ve been in Bakersfield how many years now?”

“Nineteen. But neither of those were really homes. Not the way I think of them.” I shrugged. “They were just places to live. A house. A condo.”

She turned toward me, one leg tucked under her, the seat belt straining against her right shoulder. “So what’s your definition of home?”

I thought a minute, trying to find words for the emotions that whirled through me. It wasn’t something I’d spent a lot of time contemplating before now. Perhaps on purpose. “I think a home is someplace you can’t wait to get back to. You feel so loved and accepted and, well,
at home
there. I don’t know that I’ve ever had that.”

“Not even when you were a little girl?” Alice’s voice was gentle.

“Maybe then.” My hands tightened around the steering wheel. “Maybe not. My parents weren’t demonstrative, loving people. They were both sort of—
isolated
. To themselves. Even as a little girl I remember feeling like Frannie and I had to look out for ourselves.”

“I remember how Frannie was always mothering you. Asking you if you’d done your homework, reminding you to wear a sweater—things a mother would do.”

“Yes, that was Frannie.” While other girls her age were pining for teen pop idols or TV stars, she was making sure I did my homework and forging our mother’s signature on report cards and permission slips. I’d taken her solicitude for granted in those days. I glanced at Alice. “Did you think we were odd?”

She shrugged. “Not any odder than any other family. I mean, the Olsens lived across the street from me. Nine children, two parents and an ancient grandmother who had to be locked in her room to keep her from dancing around the front yard without her clothes on. Mr. and Mrs. Olsen were usually so frazzled they referred to the children indiscriminately as ‘Hey you.’ The older ones had to help the younger ones get dressed and get to school or no one would have ever made it.”

“I remember Maida Olsen was in our class.” I smiled at the memory of the freckle-faced girl with pigtails. “She and I were the only ones without our field trip money because our parents hadn’t given it to us.” This was obviously in Frannie’s pre-forgery days. “The teacher felt sorry for us, I guess, so she let us go to the art room and do crafts all day while everyone else went to the science museum.”

“Yeah, I was so jealous, too,” Alice said. “I hated the science museum.”

“And here I was, jealous that you got to go.”

We laughed, then she turned the conversation back to
more serious matters. “So if you had a home, what would it be like?”

“When I was a little girl, I always thought a home was something I’d have when I grew up,” I said.

“You’re grown-up now, so what’s stopping you?”

I waited until I’d passed a slow-moving minivan before I answered. “I think back then, I saw
grown-up
as meaning married with a husband and children. I mean, that’s what people did—at least all the people I knew. They grew up, got jobs, got married and had children.”

“Yeah.” She sighed. “Hey, I gave it my best shot, but it didn’t work out for me, either.”

“I never pictured myself still single in my thirties.” Saying the words made my throat ache. I glanced at her. “Guess I wasn’t being very realistic. Do many people even have that husband-and-house-and-two-kids dream life these days?”

“Some do. And some are happy without that. If it’s what you want, don’t give up yet.”

“Sure. You’re right.” My palms had started to sweat and I spread my fingers wide, trying to dry the dampness. “But it was a lot easier to be optimistic at twenty-eight than at thirty-eight. It doesn’t help that I haven’t had a real boyfriend in twenty years.” Even the word
boyfriend
sounded absurd when applied to a man my age. Obviously the English language hadn’t caught up with modern reality. There ought to be a word to describe someone who isn’t yet a “significant other” but who has progressed beyond “date” and not quite to “lover.”

“Nothing to say you can’t start now,” Alice said. “A woman who got rid of a hundred pounds ought to be able to brave the big, bad dating world.”

“What do you know about it?” I looked at her again. “How long have you been divorced from your second husband?”

“Seven years. But that doesn’t mean I’ve been alone and
celibate all that time. I’ve had boyfriends. Just none I wanted to marry.”

“Because you still love Bobby?” I held my breath, waiting for the answer.

She looked startled. “What makes you say that?”

“Because…well, because you’re going to all the trouble to move back to Ojai, where he is.”

“I told you, this isn’t about Bobby. I did love him once, but there’s nothing there now. Just…indifference. This is about me. What I have to do.”

I thought of our conversation the night before, about karma and retribution and forgiveness. Was redemption as simple as wanting to do better, or as impossible as trying to change the past?

Were there things in my past I’d change if I could? Certainly I’d wanted to weigh less. And sometimes I wondered if I should have fought harder to stay in Ridgeway instead of running to California with Frannie. But it’s tricky dealing with the past. If I changed all the bad stuff, it seemed logical that would change the good times, too.

Probably just as well we couldn’t go back and make things different. Better to keep moving forward, toward whatever dim vision of the future we can perceive. At least then we can hold on to the illusion that things are still under our control. This time, we would see disaster coming and head it off, the way a driver watches ahead and avoids a traffic pileup.

Which does nothing to account for all the accidents that happen every day. I gripped the steering wheel more tightly and refused to dwell on this thought. In thirty-eight years, surely I had learned enough to keep my life on the right road this time.

We stopped for lunch in Wheeling, West Virginia. I tried not to think what a steady diet of fast-food burgers and salads was going to do to my waistline. Maybe I’d suggest we find
a grocery store and stock up on healthier stuff; we could eat better and save money, too.

Alice stretched and yawned as we walked back to the truck after we ate. “I don’t know why I’m so tired,” she said.

“You’re probably worn-out from packing and getting ready to move.” I pulled the truck keys from my purse. “I’ll keep driving. You can rest.”

“Are you sure you don’t mind? We agreed to take turns.”

“I’m good. I’m enjoying it, even.”