The Confessions of Frances Godwin (28 page)

13

“Maiden Voyage” (August 2006)

One night in mid-August I drove to TruckStopUSA, where big trucks roll in day and night, traveling east and west on Interstate 80, north and south on I-39. Tommy had bought a new truck, a big Kenwood, and Stella and Ruthy were taking it for a test run down to Anna, Illinois, and back, just to keep their hands in. A little vacation from office work. I was going to meet them at the truck stop in Ottawa and ride with them up to Milwaukee.

It was two o’clock in the morning when I got to the truck stop. I drove around a little, my heart beating faster as I passed the spot where Jimmy had parked the truck. Where I’d shot him.

The restaurant had been turned into a Burger King, but the lobby was full of the same junk, the same offensive signs.
IF
WOMEN CAN LEARN TO FAKE ORGASM
,
MEN CAN LEARN TO FAKE LISTENING
.

Men came and went. A few women, too. I had a sense of being invisible. I wanted someone to see me, especially when I went into the new Burger King and saw Stella and Ruthy at a table with a couple of truckers. Stella’s dark hair was held back in a clasp; Ruthy’s bright red hair poured out under her Cubs hat.

I joined them at the table and ordered a Whopper and listened to truck talk as I ate. It was a foreign language. Some other life was going on all around me. Stella and Ruthy ordered hundred-mile cups of coffee to go, and we said good-bye to the truckers, the other truckers, that is.

The new Kenwood was parked at a diagonal along with dozens of other “big rigs.” It was running and the exhaust was blue. “Do truckers really say ‘big rigs’?” I asked, but the trucks were making so much noise they didn’t hear me.

It was three o’clock in the morning when we left TruckStopUSA. I had the bound galleys of
Catullus Redivivus
in my briefcase. Lying on one side in the big sleeper, I turned on a little reading light, like the reading lights in an airplane, and read one of the poems aloud to Stella and Ruthy. A loose translation of 97:

I don’t know which smells worse,

Your farts or your breath.

At least your asshole doesn’t have any teeth .
.
.

“Ma,” Stella interrupted. “That’s disgusting.” She turned her head to look up at me in the bunk. Ruthy was driving.

“I think it’s pretty funny,” Ruthy said.

“Maybe you’d prefer it in Latin: “
Non (ita me di ament) quicquam referre putavi
 .
.
.”

“Enough, Ma.”

“Catullus was the first poet to really grab me,” I said. “My first love, so to speak.

“He freed himself from the impersonal objectivity of his Greek models. He responded seriously to the demands of love. There’s a kind of intimacy that was just not there in earlier literature.”

“Ma,” Stella said. “You sound like you’re giving a lecture.”

“That’s from the jacket copy,” I said.

Ruthy asked for another poem.

Let’s live and love, Lesbia.

Let the green-eyed ones go to hell if they don’t like it.

Let the sun set tonight.

Another one will come up in the morning.

But when our sun goes down,

We’ll go down with it,

Extinguished in endless night.

The backs of their heads were silhouetted, outlined by light from the dials on the dash. Ruthy still wearing her Cubs hat.

Give me a thousand kisses,

A hundred.

Another thousand.

Another hundred.

Thousands

More than green-eyes can count.

“Not bad, Ma,” Stella said. “Really. You should apply to The Writers’ Workshop.”

“Right,” I said.

“That’s nice,” Ruthy said.

“I’m going to go to sleep now,” I said.

“Before you go to sleep,” Stella said, “we’ve got a proposition for you.”

“So that’s what this trip is about,” I said. “I’ve been wondering.”

What Stella wanted to do was to form a corporation. Tommy had never incorporated his business. Now was the time. I’d invest what was left, after taxes, from the sale of the Cobra—over half a million dollars. Tommy would hold fifty-one percent of the stock. Stella and Ruthy would each hold five percent. I would hold the remaining thirty-nine percent. “Gagliano Brothers” would become “Gagliano Produce, Inc.”

“What’s in it for Tommy?” I asked.

“With your five hundred thousand we could expand into the old National Warehouse on First Street, which has its own cold storage facility.”

It would be a subchapter-S corporation. The corporation itself would pay no taxes. The profits would go directly to the shareholders. Roughly two hundred thousand dollars a year after paying salaries and the mortgage on the new warehouse. My share would be eighty thousand. Not bad on an investment of five hundred thousand. I did the calculations in my head: sixteen percent.

I was pleased and annoyed at the same time. “Tommy wants to do this?” I asked.

“He’s still going to take three months off every year.”

“Why don’t you put this in writing and send it to me so I can talk it over with my lawyer, or with the broker at A. G. Edwards?”

“Because we’ve got you trapped in the sleeper so you can’t get away till you agree.”

“It’s a good thing I didn’t put that money in the stock market,” I said. “Because the market tanked. Good thing I sold the Cobra when I did, too. The bottom’s dropped out of the classic car market.”

“Besides,” Stella said, “if you don’t do anything with the money you’re going to pay thirty-five percent to the government, but if you invest it, I think you can get a better deal. You’ll have to ask Tommy.”

“I need to go to sleep.”

“There’s one more thing, Ma.”

“That’s what I was afraid of.”

“We’re going to Italy again, right after Christmas. I want you to come with us. It’ll give you something to look forward to.”

“I’m not dead yet,” I said. “Maybe I’ll put that on my tombstone. ‘Not dead yet.’”

“Very funny, Ma.”

“What about Tommy?”

“Tommy wants you to come. You don’t have to
do
anything. I mean, you’ll have separate rooms if that’s what you’re worried about. Naples. Then Reggio Calabria. The family’s got a big house. You can see Mount Etna from the balcony.”

“Mount Etna’s in Sicily.”

“I know, Ma. But you can see it across the strait.”

“
Catullus Redivivus
is coming out in September, Stella. I’m going to be very busy.”

“You going on a book tour?”

“No.”

“Two weeks. Right after Christmas. That’s what I’m asking. You can spare two weeks. We’re going to see
Così fan tutte
at Teatro di San Carlo in Naples and then
Tosca
in Reggio Calabria.”

“I thought Tommy said
Rigoletto
in Naples. But it doesn’t matter. I’m too old for this sort of thing.”

“I think it’s
Rigoletto,”
Ruthy said.

“Ma,” Stella said, “I’d like us to be a family. It just seems so right to me. Tommy is such a good man.”

“Better than your father?”

“You don’t have to be snide. Not better than my father, but different. He puts on a show, but down deep it isn’t really a show. It’s the real thing. He’s kind and thoughtful and lots of fun.”

“And rich?”

“Yes, rich too. So what?”

“And I’m refusing to cooperate with your fantasy? Why should I cooperate? Did you ever cooperate with my fantasies? Did you ever listen to me?”

“You just cut him off. You humiliated him.”

“I think it’s time to end this conversation.”

“Ma, don’t walk away from this conversation.”

“Not likely. You’ve got me trapped. Like shooting fish in a barrel.”

“I’ve never understood that. I mean, why would you want to shoot the fish?”

Silence.

“I told him about the miscarriage,” Stella said. “I think that bothered him more than Jimmy’s death. No biological immortality.”

“He was Jimmy’s uncle, not his father.”

“Still, Jimmy would have pumped some of the same genes into the gene pool.”

“Did you tell him Jimmy pushed you?”

“I told him that too. I told him everything.”

“What do you mean ‘everything’?”

“Taking the car, Pa calling the police. What I told the prosecutor.”

“The whole works?”

“The whole works.”

Silence. “It’s been almost ten years, Stella. Besides, what about the young woman who comes on Wednesdays?”

“She got married. There’s another one now that comes on Thursdays. Another  graduate student.”

“I wouldn’t mind having a graduate student come by once a week.”

“There aren’t any graduate students in Galesburg.”

“I can see Andromeda,” I said. “Out the little window. Andromeda, Taurus, Orion. The light from Andromeda is coming from thirty-seven light years away. It started out in 1969.”

“Thirty-seven light years?” she said. “That’s pathetic. You told us that that quasar we tried to see was two and a half
billion
light years away. Two and a half
billion
.”

We contemplated these enormous distances.

“Ma,” Stella said, “I want you to do this for me. We could pre
tend
to be a family, even if it’s only for two weeks. You can see the stars, but you can’t see what’s right in front of your face.”

“Enough, Stella. I’ve got to go to sleep.”

“Good night, Ma. Do you want to listen to an opera? We’ve got
Norma
and
Le nozze di Figaro.
I know you saw both of these with Tommy.”

“No,” I said. “We saw
Turandot
, not
Figaro
.”

“And I know you went to bed with Tommy after
Norma
.”

“You don’t know any such thing,” I said.

“Well,” she said, “he was singing Figaro’s aria from ‘The Barber of Seville’ all week after that. It was like a musical comedy where the characters burst into song all the time. Or like an opera.”

“I’m tired, Stella.”

“If you don’t want to hear an opera I’m going to put on the CB radio for a little while.”

I listened to the chatter on CB radio: road work on 80 west of Joliet, which was behind us; big hats out in force in plain wrappers because of the weekend; a missing swindle sheet; a reefer hitting an underpass near the Dominick’s warehouse in Chicago; a madam who’d lost track of one of her girls in the big parking lot at the truck stop. I imagined I was in a berth on a train or on a ship, and that I didn’t know where I was going.

And then I was asleep.

I woke up at five o’clock. I had to pee, but there was no place to go. We weren’t on the interstate. We were on a county highway, near a lake. Probably near the Wisconsin border, maybe Delevan. I thought of Goethe arriving on the outskirts of Verona and unable to find a bathroom.
Anywhere,
the porter tells him.
Wherever you want.
It wasn’t the first time I’d peed behind a truck. Stella and Ruthy were skinny-dipping in a farmer’s pond, separated from the highway by a fence topped with barbed wire. I could hear them before I could see them. Just their heads. Then nothing. Then coming out of the water. Popping up like balloons, or like two nymphs. No makeup, their faces their own. They put their towels over the barbed wire to protect their legs as they climbed over the fence.

I was tempted to join them, but it was too late. What I realized, suddenly, was that Stella and Ruthy were no longer girls, no longer young women, no longer nymphs. Stella was forty-two years old. Ruthy a year older. These were two middle-aged women. I could see it in their faces, in their bodies, could see the young nymphs they had once been, and the substantial goddesses they had become, the old women they would turn into. And it broke my heart.

Natalia Ginsburg, my favorite Italian author, says that old age is essentially the end of wonder. We lose the capacity to amaze ourselves and to amaze others. Having passed our lives marveling at everything, we no longer marvel at anything. But I couldn’t agree. Love makes these moments indelible.

We drove past the cemetery where Jimmy was buried and twenty minutes later we were at the market. It was six thirty in the morning. The market was bursting with life. Tommy came out to greet us. He was older too. His red hair had faded, like the paint on the Cobra. He touched his cheek with his index finger. (A warning? Danger?) His sleeves were rolled up; his light skin was translucent; the freckles on his arms were starting to look like liver spots, or stars, constellations.