Everything You Want (21 page)

Even I can hear in my voice that it’s
not
, and I feel myself sink a notch lower when Mom says, “Well, that’s good.” Pretending she believes me. “Listen, I got your dad’s letter yesterday—”

That time warp thing happens again.

“ ... okay with me,” she goes on, about the bike trip, I assume. “It’s for you to decide, really. Each of us has to do that, you know? Decide what’s right for ourselves.”

I have to say I don’t like the sound of that. I’m half-afraid she’s going to tell me something she’s decided about herself, something I’m not going to want to know. Which she does, sideways, talking about her trip to Monet’s house at Giverny. She went there to paint—which you can do, if you arrange it ahead of time. She rented an easel and set it up in the garden, but the tourists were too distracting. Even though she chose an out-of-the-way corner, they stopped and peered at her through the spring flowers as if she were part of a museum exhibit.

“So I took a break and went over to the house,” she says. “I was upstairs in Monet’s bedroom, looking out the window at masses of tulips, every color you can imagine. Just glowing. And blue forget-me-nots. The fruit trees were covered with blossoms. They looked like prom dresses. Or pink clouds—

“I said to myself, this is what he saw. And then the light changed and
I
saw—I suddenly understood—that, yes, of course, he was obsessed with light, but the paintings are about so much more than that. Think about it, Emma,” she said. “Haystacks, poplars, water lilies. How can they be so beautiful and make you feel so sad?”

She doesn’t give me time to attempt an answer.

“Because light’s a metaphor! The paintings are about life itself, how you try to hold on to what you love, all the while knowing that each moment carries its own tiny death within it. Everything,
everything
is alive and dying at the same time. Nothing lasts.”

It falls quiet between us. There’s a little crackling on the phone line. Maybe she says something else I don’t hear.

“Mom?” I say.

“I’m here,” she says. “Oh, Emma, this time has been so good for me. Being alone, thinking about hard things. Have a wonderful trip with Dad. You think about hard things, too, while you’re away.”

“He’s not here right now,” I say. “Want me to have him call you when he gets back?”

She’s quiet a moment. “I don’t think so,” she says. “Just tell him to have a good time. And I love him. You, too, Emma.” Then she bumbles a kind of apology, tries to reassure me that things will work out fine.

We hang up and I go to the garage and sit on my bike. It’s waxed, gassed up, and ready to go in the morning. Even my saddlebags are packed. We’re leaving at six a.m.; in Paris, it will be one o’clock in the afternoon. I close my eyes and try to imagine Mom there, but all I see is Dad and me on our Harleys, riding farther and farther away from her.

Thirty–one

Our engines start up, shattering the early morning air. “Harley’s
sound
,” Dad always says when anyone asks him why he loves them so much. “That’s what they’re all about.”

Now I know exactly what he means. Sitting on my bike, ready to go, I
am
the sound: the low, throaty burbling of the exhaust, the clacking valves, the thump, thump of the big pistons. The raw power of the engine rumbles right up through the seat of my jeans and flows through me, as vital as blood.

Dad guns the Sturgis and grins, gives me the thumbs up, and we’re off. The weather’s perfect, a tinge of early warmth promising to heat up to an almost-summer day by noon. We stop for breakfast at Bedford, then arc west toward Illinois. The highway winds through the Hoosier National Forest, through the rich farmland in the southern part of the state. It smells green. Occasionally, a farmer waves from his yellow tractor. Kids wave, too, when we pass through little towns.

“Everyone loves a Harley,” Dad says.

We get to Emporia that first day, just the other side of Kansas City. My arms and shoulders ache from having been locked in the same position. The sudden absence of wind makes me feel light, slightly unbalanced, and I can still feel the vibration of the engine inside me. I go to sleep, feeling it. Ride all night in my dreams.

The next evening, near dark, we roll into a little town near the Kansas-Colorado border, check in at a mom-and-pop motel, and ask the desk guy where we can get a decent meal. There’s a bar a couple of miles down the road where they serve great steaks, he tells us. But when we get there, a man standing at the door, smoking, says the whole place is reserved for a private anniversary party. “Twenty-fifth,” he says. “My sister’s twenty-fifth, in fact.” He’s a nice guy, a Harley rider himself, but I can’t see any point in Dad standing there talking about bikes with him when we can’t eat here and, according to the motel clerk, there’s no other decent restaurant for miles. I’m starving. The kitchen windows of the restaurant are open and I can smell steaks cooking. I’m just about to try to talk Dad into riding up to the interstate to see if we can find a McDonald’s, when the guy—Dave—says, “I’ll tell you what, Mac. I think I can get you guys in on this deal tonight. Wait here, okay?”

“
Dad
,” I say, when he’s gone inside. “We can’t crash somebody’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.”

But Dave sticks his head out the door and motions us to follow him; and before I know it, we’re sitting with the guests of honor at the main table. Dad springs for champagne for everyone, and the corks pop as introductions are made. There’s Dave’s wife, Marilyn. Bob and Linda, whose anniversary it is, and their sons, Randy and Bob Jr.—about my age. Dave’s and Linda’s parents, Bud and Lil.

All through dinner, there’s a constant parade of people out to see the bikes. Linda and Marilyn love the fact that mine is turquoise. Randy and Bob Jr. have never met a girl who rides, and they keep looking back and forth between me and the bike with bemused expressions.

One young, really drunk guy—Jack—looks at Dad’s Sturgis for a long time.

“You ride?” Dad asks.

“Nah,” he says. “Not any more. I cut a deal with the state of Kansas. Sheriff said, ‘Jack, either you drink or you drive. What’ll it be?’” He grins goofily and raises his beer mug.

Dad laughs, and throws his arm around the guy’s shoulders. It’s one of the great things about him, I think. The way he takes people just exactly the way they are. Mom’s always trying to understand them. She’d meet a guy like Jack and talk you to death about him afterwards, trying to puzzle him out. Not Dad. It never occurs to him to wonder how a person got to be the way he is, or how he’s going to end up.

I wish I could be that way.
Right now Dad isn’t thinking about what a great evening it’s turned out to be or what a relief it is that none of these people know that we’re rich. He isn’t noticing the way the neon sign blinks in the night or the smell of the earth or the little ramshackle house across the road with the television flickering in the window. He
lives
in an almost perpetual state of
shunyata
. Moment to moment. Just being.

But standing in the parking lot that spring evening—wearing Gabe Parker’s inside-out Phi Delt sweatshirt, like a widow wearing some relic of her lost love—I feel something loosen inside me, and I’m so filled up with emotion that I think I might cry. I want to remember everything: the white cowboy hats gleaming in the moonlight, the tips of cigarettes glittering like fireflies. I want to remember the sound of the band tuning up inside and how everyone insists that Dad and I stay and dance.

Which we do, until our feet are burning. Linda teaches Dad to swing dance and makes him dance with her all night because Bob hates dancing. Bob Jr. teaches me. He’s a big, beefy guy, exactly my age as it turns out, and already farming with his dad. I feel small and light and graceful spinning out from beneath his hands. I feel lit up. I feel myself smiling. When the band breaks into an old Patsy Cline song I love, I sing along so loud that, laughing, Randy picks me up and sets me on the stage with them. The singer, a hard-looking girl with a big voice, grins and leans toward me with the mike and we belt out the rest of the words together. I’m flustered and a little embarrassed when the song is over and everyone applauds wildly, yelling at me to sing again. But I feel good. I feel like
myself
.

I think about that a lot the next day, riding. Or maybe it’s closer to say that memories float up while I’m riding, and I think about how they feel. I remember my friend, Renata, whom I haven’t seen for ages. We were three when we met at nursery school. We played together all day, and sometimes I cried when it was time to go home because I didn’t want to leave my friend. Renata had beautiful toffee-colored skin and wonderful black pigtails that stuck out from her head exactly like Mickey Mouse ears. I wanted to look just like her. The thing is, Grandma Hammond had dragged me to Sunday School a couple of times, and I guess I got some convoluted idea about what religion was, because I got it in my head that Jesus could make this happen for me. Every night, in the bathtub, I checked out every inch of my body to see if He had decided to answer my prayers.

“Mom! Mom!” I yelled one night. I pointed to my knee, all shriveled from being in the water so long. “Look,” I said. “Look! Jesus is making me brown, just like Renata.”

It’s another one of Mom’s favorite stories about me. She never fails to tell it when explaining to someone what a strange child I was. I’d always thought it was pretty funny myself. Just a funny story. But now, suddenly, it seems like more than that.

Just like Renata
.

I realize for the first time that, in the past, whenever I tried to figure out who I was or what I wanted to be, it was always a matter of measuring myself against someone else. I was emotional, creative, verbal, curious—like Mom. I was a speed-demon—like Dad. I wanted Jules’ body, I wanted Renata’s pretty brown skin and her kinky brown Mickey Mouse pigtails.

I think of this animal mix-up book that I used to play with when I was little. There were three sets of pages, top to bottom: heads, torsos, and legs of animals. You flipped them to make bizarre concoctions. A gelephingo, for example: the head of a giraffe, the body of an elephant, the legs of a flamingo.

I felt like myself, singing at the party; but who, exactly, is that self? Is it just a human version of the mix-up game, or is it more than that? What is it about
my
self that’s different from any other self that’s ever been born? And, supposing I could figure that out, where would Harp’s
shunyata
thing fit into the picture? Can you lose a self you haven’t found yet? Do you have to find your true self to be able to let it go?

I’m still pondering all this when we stop to fill our gas tanks. So I say to Dad, “What would you say the essence of Emma is?”

He taps the nozzle lightly so that the last drops of gas will go inside the gas tank, not on it where they might mar the shine. “The
essence
of Emma?”

“Yeah. I’ve been thinking. Last night when I was singing with the band I was really, really happy, and I asked myself why. You know, why was I happy? And it was because singing made me feel exactly like myself. But then I thought, what
is
my self?”

Dad says, “Christ, you sound just like your mother.”

“Hel-
lo
,” I say. “That’s exactly my point. Every time I try to figure out who I am, I end up comparing myself to Mom or you or Jules or—whoever. But who am
I
? I mean, suppose you and Mom had ditched me at birth and I was raised by a whole other family. What part of me would be exactly the same as it is now?”

“But we didn’t ditch you,” he says. “You are who you are.”

“Dad,” I say, “what I’m asking you is—”

“I know what you’re asking me. But I don’t know the answer. To tell you the truth, it doesn’t seem that important. If singing made you happy, then you ought to sing more often. Seems pretty simple to me. Do what makes you happy, and you’ll be happy. Plus, you won’t have time to torture yourself with questions you can’t answer.”

“Maybe some people need to do that,” I say. “Maybe torturing themselves with unanswerable questions is the only way they can figure out how to be happy.”

“I’m sure that’s true,” Dad says. “I just never have been able to understand why.”

It’s an honest response. Still, it pisses me off the way he says it so matter-of-factly, as if he’s just decided to accept the fact that he’ll never understand me. I’m pissed off at Mom, too. For being so consumed by her own unanswerable questions that she left me all alone to ponder mine.

I fume the whole time Dad’s in the station, paying. “You really think the world would be a better place if everyone was like you, don’t you?” I say when he comes out.

“Nope. But I’ve got to say, it’s not the worst thing I can imagine.” He grins, waves his hand as if to encompass the entire planet. “Cold beer in every refrigerator, a Harley-Davidson in every garage!”

“You’re so funny,” I say. “Don’t you ever take anything seriously?”

Dad puts his helmet back on, hikes his leg over the tank of his bike. “Many things, Emma,” he says. “I think you know that. But never myself.”

Well, fine, I think. Fine. He’s so annoying sometimes.
Seems pretty simple to me
. He always says that.
Lighten up
. He’d have said that next, if I’d given him a chance. I get myself about half worked up into a snit; but once we get going again, there’s the feel of the bike throbbing all through my body, the gray asphalt stretching forever, the foothills of the Rockies rolling out on either side, and my annoyance dissolves into the same pure happiness I felt the night before, singing at the bar.
Shunyata
. Not thinking about anything at all.

That night I dream I have a box of gargantuan crayons and I’m drawing everything around me. I make the Kansas hills yellow. I make the sky porcelain blue, the way it is high in the mountains where the air is thin and clear. I make trees the first green of spring. And flowers every color, everywhere.

I’m so happy coloring the world. I wake, afterwards, completely content, and lie in the motel bed in the darkness, smiling, remembering how much I used to love to draw. I’d spend hours and hours drawing pictures on sheets of white typing paper. Each one had a story, which I told to Mom. She wrote it on the back of the page, with the date, and put it in a drawer in her studio. Last year, when I graduated from high school, she collected the best ones and put them in a loose-leaf notebook as a gift.

Now, turning the pages of that book in my mind’s eye, I remember how strange and vivid the world seemed to me then. “Basketball Players Going to the Haunted House,” “Emma Riding an Alligator with a Blue Eye,” “Ninjas Taking Ballet.”

I can’t even remember the last time I imagined anything wonderfully unreal, something all my own, and I wonder why I haven’t known to miss that inner world. It’s safe there, though not predictable. Jesus can have blue hair, little girls can ride alligators. They can be whoever they want to be—and not only one thing, either. Every single story is its own little life.