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Episode Four Giddy with a combination of a prolonged bout of academentia and the sleep deprivation it had required, Kala slid a copy of the paper across the table to Vivian. She'd finished it that morning around eight, just in time to nudge Theo awake so that he could proofread it while she showered, and she was still amused enough by the title she'd dreamed up at the last minute that she announced it aloud as Vivian picked up the stapled-together pages. "High Colonics: An Investigation Into Perceptions of Intellectual Rigor and the Significance of The Full Colon in Academic Conference Paper Titles. I think that may just be the best paper I've written in the past three years." "It definitely qualifies as one of the better titles I've seen lately," Vivian chortled as she flipped through the first few pages. "You wrote this for Peter Leonhardt?" Kala nodded. "Good. He'll appreciate it, I'm sure." Slipping the document into her bag, into a manila folder already stuffed with her own students' term papers, Vivian looked over her shoulder, then leaned in confidentially. "Actually, I'm tickled pink that it looks as if one of his students has finally handed that man a dose of his own medicine. I've been listening to him babble for well over a decade and I swear -- and this is just between you and I, Kala -- I swear that if someone gave that man an enema, you could bury what was left in a Band-Aid box. Which is to say that if your paper is half as amusing as I think it might be, I'm quite looking forward to reading it." Kala's eyes popped open as she stifled a cackle, immeasurably pleased both by the sudden display of such a genially catty streak in the otherwise conservative Vivian, and by the confirmation that she and her classmates weren't the only ones who found Dr. Leonhardt completely insufferable. She hoped Vivian would think the paper was a good one. She herself was still too close to the paper to have any sort of objectivity, but that was only to be expected. For the moment, it just felt good to have a finished product that she could hold in her hand and shove into her professor's mailbox. It was that time of year, when uncounted students did their level if unconscious best to deforest another priceless subtropical biome, the trees metamorphosing through paper mill and printer to bloom again in the form of essays, analyses, and final projects large and small. Kala was about to go harvest her own bouquet of flowers of undergraduate labor after lunch, but for the moment she was trying to block out awareness of the imminent deluge and the long-suffering teenaged faces that would no doubt accompany it. She'd made sure to take a couple of notebooks out of her backpack to make room for the incoming stack…room which, it seemed, was about to be co-opted. Above a thick folder of printouts, brochures, clippings, and hand-scrawled yellow legal-pad sheets that slid Kala-ward across the dark wood tabletop, Vivian beamed like a proud new mother. On the cover of the folder, in the older woman's neat, old-fashioned hand, was the legend "Summer Research Tour: Itinerary and Planning." It's no secret that a glance can say more than a sentence and that some facial expressions can beggar even the most eloquently worded paragraphs. The sticky bit is the interpretation. Faced with the overstuffed file folder, Kala's dumbstruck stare might've telegraphed sudden panic, a sort of overload crisis caused by the sudden threat of too damned much impending input. Or it might've, as Vivian's own enthusiasm and professorial ego led her to think, indicated an almost awestruck reverence upon being presented with a finely-crafted fait accompli of research and organization. Then again, it could've -- particularly as Kala's stare intensified as she opened the folder and scanned the topmost list -- been the ill-timed coincidence of an enormous pile of papers and a tired pair of eyes whose owner had just forced them through a torturous overnighter. Doubtless the most correct interpretation would contain elements of all of these, plus the dim but increasingly vivid realization that Kala would have to find some way to inform Vivian that when it came to this voyage the two of them were about to make, Vivian's eyes appeared to be a little bigger than any stomach could reasonably stretch. Using her finger to trace the lines as she slid her eyes down the list, Kala skimmed: Boston to Newport to New York, New York to Philadelphia to Baltimore. So far, so good. Then to Washington, D.C., and on to Atlanta the next day. In a car. "Atlanta to… Chicago? In a day? Um, Vivian, I don't think that's possible," she said quietly, trying to guess at the mileage. "I mean, Boston to Youngstown is a long day's drive. Ten hours or so. Atlanta to Chicago's quite a bit further than that." Vivian furrowed her brow. It hadn't looked so far in the atlas. She'd tried to use the little tables in the margins of her road atlas to figure mileages, but they didn't always give the distances for the exact places she wanted, so she'd spent quite a while scribbling figures on a scrap of paper, adding and subtracting, but somewhere in the parti-colored pages of Rand McNally she eventually she got the sense that she'd lost track of where she was in the calculations and gave it up in favor of flipping through Fodor's Guide to the USA and looking for promising-looking blue and brown squiggles -- she liked the idea of taking scenic routes wherever possible -- on the map. "And I don't really know, because I've never been out there, but something tells me that the same is true of San Francisco to Seattle. Particularly if you're really dead-set on taking the Pacific Coast Highway. You can't go as fast if it isn't an interstate." Pursing her lips, Vivian leaned over the table to get to the folder, flipping through the fat stack of paper until she found a slightly dog-eared article, neatly slit out of an old issue of Town and Country, the magazine's date penciled in the margin. She pointed to a gorgeous, vividly-saturated photograph showing the crest of a road arching between tall pines toward a dappled Monet sunset. Her face wore an unexpectedly childlike look, halfway between bemusement at her own ignorance and a pout that things weren't in fact the way she'd imagined. "But it's very pretty, isn't it?" Helping to raise her sisters, working as a nanny, dealing with the men in the clubs where she'd danced, teaching undergraduates how to write a reasonable facsimile of a term paper-many of the things Kala had spent many years doing had equipped her well to take charge, to wield discipline, to impose her own ideas of how things should be done. And she'd seen quite a few different responses to it, from hostility to tears. But it startled her that Vivian was rolling over like a puppy, doing the sorority-chick I'm-ditzy-but-cute-so-be-nice-to-me thing. Agreeing that the picture was in fact very pretty, Kala averted her eyes from the searching expression on Vivian's face and studied the itinerary list with great intent, scanning the lines as if somewhere in between them there would be some clue as to how to approach this. Slightly nervous, aware that she was oversensitive to pretty much everything at that time of the semester, Vivian rattled the ice cubes in her half-empty water glass and looked around for the waiter. What she could see of Kala's face was blank, cautious, indecipherable. Soft heat emanated from her earlobes: damn it all, she'd begun to blush. Sometimes it would've been easier to be a virgin at fifty-four than a non-driver. Virgins could at least chalk it up to Godliness, wear their inexperience like Christ's own thorny diadem, full of meaningful sacrifice whether they'd chosen it or had it thrust, as it were, upon them. Non-drivers -- unless they were lifelong Manhattanites, who by general consensus seemed to be alone amongst North Americans in deserving a special sort of release (printed, perhaps, in the New Yorker's natty long-legged font) from the task of learning how to herd an internal combustion engine on wheels-could only stand mute in the face of every symbolic gesture the highway could bring to bear. There were simply those who had mastered the All-American gesture of getting behind the wheel and taking off down the road, and those who had not. Vivian comforted herself by reminding herself that being young, capable, beautiful, and drivers' license-owning wasn't everything: Kala, after all, had still ended up a stripper. Then she bit her lip and frowned at herself. Vivian always hated realizing that she was being petty. Besides, Vivian reminded herself rather adamantly, aside from making a mistake with a road map once in a while, not driving certainly didn't cramp her style. She liked to think she'd transformed her non-driver-hood, wrapped her inability in a cocoon of old-worldish mystique and charm. When you don't know how to drive, you carve your world in a way that now seems eccentric, become a habitué of certain boulevards at certain times of day, a connoisseur of neighborhoods within neighborhoods, of the knitting-together of shops and houses, streetcorners and schools, check the status of remodeling jobs and who moves out and in. In some states of mind it feels quite debonair, Parisian, the path of the boulevardier or the avant-garde Situationist with his intimate radar for psychogeographical sublimes. In others it feels antiquated, constricted, crabbed, pitiful, the little old lady of whatever gender who never learned to drive. In many moments it feels both at once, and you are pricklingly aware of the two layers scraping against one another like sheets of sandpaper, trying to figure out whether the distrust comes from within one's self or from without, from the uncomprehending "ohs" of the people to whom you must inevitably explain yourself. You learn to take pride in it, though, in the mundane little suffering that comes your way because other people don't get it when you don't drive. You just make it clear who's really the philistine. Vivian didn't like to admit that she might possibly be a little hypersensitive about the whole driving issue, but at the same time she was aware that she probably was. Claiming the moral and aesthetic high ground was a bit of a straw man, but a surprisingly comfortable, even couchlike one for all that. It made her feel better. She'd often thought that it'd be nicer to just be able to enjoy her pedestrian self. If only the world understood that "pedestrian" could be literally true without being metaphorically so. Kala turned the page, bit her lip slightly, thoughtfully. Vivian almost said something, but stopped just as the breath reached her vocal cords: it would've been premature, and probably unfair. Give her the chance to respond before you scold her for getting it wrong, Vivian,she told herself, realizing that she'd been having to tell herself that a lot during that final week of the semester. She hated the end of the semester: angst, excuses, and overwork for everybody. Her antacid consumption had seasonal peaks that coincided directly with the arrival of term papers and finals. For probably the thousandth time, she wondered if there wasn't some mathematical constant in which a person's love of teaching might be proven to be inversely proportional to their inability to bear the judgment calls of grading. After all, Kala didn't look dismissive, after all, or even really irritated, just intent as she pored over the list. Their food arrived, a welcome and delicious-smelling distraction served by a young waiter who was likewise, his Mediterranean curls and fine broad hands and shoulders garnering appreciative half-smiles from both women. The dutiful and pleasant smile he bestowed upon Vivian broadened appreciably when he turned it on Kala, sending an irrational, tiny, vivid spark of jealousy through Vivian's solar plexus. Vivian pursed her lips, chiding herself for being so smallminded. Kala hadn't done anything wrong. It wasn't exactly her fault that she was the kind of woman who caught men's eyes. And it wasn't her fault, or even the waiter's really, that he so obviously noticed the curve of her lip, the heartbreaking sweetness of the curve of her chest as it filled out the thin colorful cotton of her scoop-necked T-shirt, or the elegant, upright way she held herself. It was merely youth and beauty playing the games youth and beauty were supposed to play. Games which, Vivian noted, age did not exactly disdain. She allowed herself the brief fantasy image of the two young, sleek bodies intertwined, golden limbs shimmery with sweat, and then snuffed it like a butt in an ashtray. Late spring still exercised its libidinal magic, menopause or no. But the sullen fuse of envy still smoldered a bit, despite her rational attempts to smother it, and as Kala broke off exchanging a glance with the waiter to catch her gaze instead, Vivian was prepared, if privately a bit ashamed, to be archly irritable. "I think I've got it," Kala announced, opening her hamburger bun to begin the condiment-application process. "Newport is all about Gatsby. New York is, well, everybody. Baltimore is Poe and Mencken. Atlanta is pure Tara, and Miz Scarlet, I don't know nothin' 'bout birthin' no babies. Chicago is Studs Terkel, Carl Sandburg. And Oprah, for that matter. Great American Writers. Am I on the right track?" "I'm not sure whether I should be impressed with you or disappointed that I was so obvious," Vivian replied, a bit surprised by the response, yet definitely pleased by the young woman's acuity. "The answer is yes, of course. Partly, anyway. I had other reasons for choosing those cities. Friends, family. You know." Shrugging, Kala gave the bottom of the ketchup bottle a solid swat and was rewarded with an obscenely sudden hemorrhage that swamped her hamburger and oozed off into her French fries. Another shrug, and she slapped the top half of the bun back on, leaned over her plate so that errant ketchup wouldn't land on her blouse, and took a bite, looking to Vivian to continue. Feeling slightly too old to be doing what she was doing, Vivian sipped some soup. She wanted an uncomplicated trip. She should've learned to drive when she bought the car. She didn't want to feel put on the spot, particularly not by a beautiful young thing who was too smart to be easily intimidated, too intimidating in too many ways of which she was completely unconscious not to be reckoned with, and too genuinely nice to be disliked. So much for the fear -- or had it been more than halfway a hope? -- that the scholarship girl Felice recommended would be pleasant but basically dull. It would've been easier. But not necessarily better, Vivian had to remind herself. If she was going to be behind the wheel it was best that she be able to speak up when necessary. Besides, anyone young enough to be her daughter who could keep up with her and even surprise her occasionally was certainly a fine sort of challenge. One that she might even enjoy, once the end of the semester had passed. Methodically pulping a soft, savory legume between her front teeth and watching her omnivorous companion tucking into her extra-rare hamburger with unselfconscious enjoyment, Vivian forced her irritability to fade. "Besides," Vivian remarked, "I've got friends scattered about. Some of them I think you'll enjoy meeting. It can't hurt for you to get to know some senior faculty around the country on an informal level. You'll be jobhunting in a few years' time, after all, and the market's not what it was when I finished my dissertation." Kala beamed around a mouthful of burger. Like every other doctoral student she knew, Kala occasionally worried in dead but realistic earnest about what would become of her once she emerged from grad school. It always seemed that other people had more contacts, had been to more conferences, had spent more time on research fellowships and internships with academic journals and on and on. The necessity of working most weekends, combined with the exigencies of relative poverty, kept Kala from taking on those unpaid internships, from going to many of the conferences she might otherwise have enjoyed. Kala had no doubt at all that some fairly high-up academics had been into the clubs she'd danced in, and had in fact recognized more than a few during times when big conferences were in town, but "You'd remember me if I shook my tits in your face" wasn't the kind of thing a girl could very well say during a job interview. Even if it were true. Trying not to get too prematurely enthusiastic about the idea of meeting the kind of germinal scholars with whom Vivian was likely to be friends -- visions of genteel sherries in book-filled houses, of possibly impressing one of the people whose writings had so impressed her -- Kala tried to put her finger on what seemed wrong about the lengthy itinerary Vivian had proposed. It seemed a little forced, somehow, but she wasn't really sure how to describe it yet. As Vivian flipped the itinerary sheet around, pointing out the spots she thought most important and wondering aloud if they'd have time to make it up to Vancouver, Kala smeared French fries in ketchup and munched them, thoughtful and tired, trying not to let her mind wander too much from the issues at hand. Then a bleary-eyed bearded man shuffled in, bearded and blinking as his eyes slowly adjusted to Grendel's dim, wood-paneled interior, a hardbound copy of Winesburg, Ohio, tucked under his jean-jacketed arm, evidently looking for a friend. That's it exactly, Kala thought as the man spotted his companion and beelined diagonally across the room, weaving his way between the tables, haphazardly jostling several diners and mumbling apologies but not changing his course. "Vivian," she interrupted, gesturing with a half-eaten fry, "it strikes me that that entire list is nothing but big cities. And a few tourist towns. But basically big cities." Vivian shrugged as she took a bite of soup. "So?" "So is it that you don't want to do what you said you wanted to do, or am I missing something?" The irritability she'd so valiantly shoved down returned in an instant. "What on earth is that supposed to mean?" Midwesterners transplanted to the edges of the continent come in two types: the first are altogether eager to lose any hint of affiliation with the flatlands, desperate to shuck the hickster aura which they are convinced clings to them like a lamprey, sucking any chance at coolness right out of them. The second type is urbane enough to realize that that particular imaginary parasite can only be seen by people with serious tunnel vision. The first kind only knows enough to leave home as soon as possible and high-tail it to somewhere more sophisticated. The second kind knows enough to turn around periodically and remember the things they miss since they did the same thing. The second kind also frequently ends up being the person who ends up having to explain those things to people who, having never experienced them, assume that they simply don't exist. Trying to avoid letting nostalgia tint her telling too deeply, Kala explained what she'd thought it meant when Vivian had said she'd wanted to experience what lay between the big cities she'd only visited by air. It wasn't just the rolling-by of the land outside the car window that made America the vastness it was, but the cities and towns that rolled by with it. Places too small to have their own airports or sections in a guidebook didn't matter any less, it was just that their effect was cumulative rather than immediate. And they were different, more different from the big cities than the big cities were from one another, and, once you learned to read them -- to sense who lived where, what drew people together, which café or diner was the best place to overhear juicy local gossip, how the town had grown up and tangled itself together -- as different one from the next as snowflakes, their inhabitants and stories as distinctive as any big-city drama. The paradoxical variety of the typical small town was the there that was there in those long expanses between the towns whose names were set in the bigger, bolder type on the maps. It was about knowing where the wrong side of the tracks was, and what kinds of trains ran on those tracks, about the places where the trains went past bars with pickup trucks in the parking lots, lights flashing through trees along the easement separating the track from small houses, clapboard churches, auto body shops, trailer parks. If Vivian wanted to write about America, it didn't make sense to write only about big-city America. Despite the impression given by television and movies and books that echoed the coastal urban superiority Leitmotiv in a thousand appealing, stylish voices, something did in fact exist in the great cultural DMZ between Los Angeles and New York City, and it wasn't just an undifferentiated expanse of Wonder Bread, malleable, soft, infantile, devoid of substance, nutritively bankrupt. And after all, the big cities didn't get that big all by themselves. Everybody had to be from somewhere, after all. Which wasn't to say that everything was the same, not at all. Just that the stereotypes of difference often got in the way of perceiving the real differences of place and mood, the meaningful, sometimes subtle, variations in psychological climate, the richness and variability of small town, megalopolis, village, city. How could you write about the details of difference when you'd never really felt them or seen them? There were so many changes, so many metamorphoses large and small, that came from being in a place and leaving it. But without knowing the places, you'd never know the differences, either. Sure, the big glittering cities had their age-old allure, but still it wasn't as if you stepped back through a time warp as soon as you left them. It was possible to get a good cup of coffee in Ohio, damn it all, just as possible as it was to get a crappy one in Cambridge. Yes, there were rednecks and shitkickers to deal with in the heartland. Kala had grown up with them, had an intimate awareness of their likelihood to assume the worst of her and her ancestry based on the fact that she didn't look like they did, that her lips were fuller, her hair blacker and wavier, skin both darker and more golden, the shape of her eyes something that might've been whispered about from behind some Oriental screen. But racism could be as easily found in the lily-white aisles of the most politically correct whole foods grocery store in Boston as it could anywhere, and neither the cloying perfume of upper-middle-class urban liberal guilt nor the slightly more accurate guesses about her ethnic ancestry improved it much. She was as exotic-looking in Harvard's sere Palladian halls as she'd ever been in the scrubby vacant lots of Youngstown's low-rent western fringes, and frankly, the reactions weren't all that much different. Kala stopped suddenly, realizing that she was getting off track. "Sorry. I rant sometimes," she apologized, looking at the half a French fry she still held in her right hand for a moment as if it were to blame. She ate it before it could cause any more trouble. A few minutes passed before either of them spoke. Kala felt the waiter's eyes on her when he approached to fill their water glasses, but didn't look up from her burger. She was right, of course. Vivian had to admit that, even though it smarted to be caught in her own short-sightedness...and again by her own limited experience. She'd never in her life dealt well with feeling ignorant. It made her defensive and angry, made her feel like a stupid little kid who had been called up on the carpet, like she looked like an idiot. She'd never been big or strong. Her bad leg tended to make her feel weak, constantly in danger of falling or just failing when faced with something as seemingly minor as wet leaves on the pavement or a big parcel that required both hands to manage. She'd never felt able to depend on her looks to carry her, either. When she was younger, her cane seemed to cancel out most of the gleams of intrigue her fine-boned elegance had conjured in men's eyes; as a woman d'une certaine age, she knew she still looked good, better than many, but it was simply not the same game. Her brain had always been her biggest defense, her biggest asset, her intelligence and knowledge the most dependable forces she had to bring to bear on any problem or throw at any adversary. Even the momentary sensation that it might've failed her was enough to induce a burning panic, the thought that she might've failed at it through simplistic thinking or lack of planning induced an equally incendiary sense of shame. "It is," Vivian began, her words deliberate, professorial, "difficult to plan an itinerary to places you don't know about, that aren't in guidebooks. My little life here in Cambridge is admittedly a bit circumscribed geographically. But I'm not unaware that there are small towns in between the big ones, dear." Kala wished she'd just bitten her tongue. She was the employee, not the employer. Vivian hadn't asked for her commentary, and certainly not for the extended rant she'd been given. There I go again, she chided herself. Me and my big mouth. She could've found another way to say it, another method to gently insinuate some small-town stops into their path. It wasn't that she thought she knew everyplace Vivian should go, it just seemed like she should go to a few places that weren't the kinds of places anyone ever talked about, places no one would ever mention because they weren't exactly tourist attractions. Those were the kinds of towns that she liked herself, little places, dots on the map. Sometimes she would head out after a Saturday night shift, fortifying herself with a huge bottle of Diet Coke from the Store 24, plunging into the supremely sensual isolation of a good long night drive, windows down, stereo off, taking the back roads, smelling the air and the trees, talking to herself and the crickets. By the time the sun opened its lazy eye and peeked above the horizon, she was usually parked somewhere, dozing briefly in front of some promising-looking diner or small town café before heading inside for a dose of coffee and eggs and eavesdropping on conversations about people she'd never meet and a place she might never be again. Gardiner, Maine. Chester, Vermont. That little tiny town just before the Quebec border whose name she always forgot, where she'd given a kiss on the cheek to the fat Greek guy behind the counter at the diner just because she liked his rock 'n' roll smile and his unapologetic, infectious, lusty delight in finding a pretty girl at his diner counter at that hour. She wished she could introduce Vivian to him, for some reason, wished she could explain why it was so magical to discover Bacchus -- with a unruly belly that bounced when he laughed -- in a picturesque town of tidy little houses and prim white steeples. Or to express the delight she always felt when she discovered some half-forgotten main street, its Victorian grandeur still present in the short few blocks of imposing homes that lined a road that soon turned back into two-lane rural delivery route. They were the sorts of things you didn't encounter unless you drove. There wasn't really any other way to get to them. Or any other way to get around once you were there. Which meant that Vivian probably felt as if she had been condescended to, that Kala had copped the typical irritating attitude of the average American who acts as if driving were as integral to life as eating. Guilt hardened her fries and burger into a leaden lump in her stomach. She hadn't meant it that way at all. "Which is to say that you're right, in essence." With a slight smile of satisfaction, Vivian registered the girl's surprise at being told so, the suddenly bright and hopeful look in her eyes. Intelligence was not after all her only social weapon, just the primary one. Years of teaching and playing campus politics had let her put a keen edge on some of the others. "Take the folder with you and we'll talk in a week and a half, once both our grades are in. I'm willing to be flexible. Within limits." Watching Vivian polish off the remains of her soup, Kala felt unsure what to make of her. Just like her grandmother, Vivian was tiny, but not to be trifled with. And just like her grandmother, Vivian was proud. She only hoped that Vivian was really as far below Kala's grandmother's hair-trigger threshold of volatility as she seemed. Kala knew she wasn't capable of being buttoned up all the time, and she sensed it would be okay, that things between she and Vivian would become more comfortable as they got to know one another better and time and tide did their work. But eight weeks with someone in any car, no matter how luxurious, was an awfully long time. With a little luck, maybe it wouldn't be too bumpy a ride.
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