Zigzag (21 page)

I think Dory was just about to launch into her news when Iris, in a remarkably good mood, started telling us about
her
favorite teacher, Mr. Dobbins, who she'd had for biology this year and would have again next year for some other science course. He was so fabulous, there was no better teacher alive, etc. Dory's smile
froze, then cracked apart like an ice cube in warm water.

She grabbed the bill and stood up. “Okay, let's find a motel,” she said. “Another long drive tomorrow.”

Groans.

“I'm sick of cars and motels,” Marsh said.

“Tomorrow night we're staying someplace nice again. For two nights,” Dory promised.

“Where?”

“In Texas.”

“
Texas
? We're going to
Texas
?” Iris said.

Dory put her hands on her hips. “How can you see the West if you skip over Texas? At least a corner of it anyway. Don't worry. After Texas, we're headed for New Mexico, Arizona, and then California.”

“California!” Marshall said.

“The trip that never ends,” Iris said.

“It would be nice if it didn't, if we could just keep zigzagging across the country, planning life day by day,” Dory said wistfully.

Iris tossed her hair. “Well, that's
my
nightmare.”

I knew Dory wouldn't appreciate my agreeing with Iris on this particular subject, so I kept my mouth shut.

I guess Dory didn't sleep too well that night. The next morning she looked groggy and annoyed as she herded us into a half-empty coffee shop. She'd barely had her first sip of caffeine before she launched into the announcement. I guess she didn't want to get sidetracked again.

“I have something to tell you. I've made a decision, and you may not like it, but that's the way it's going to be.” She took a deep breath, readying herself for the explosion.

“We're going home!” Iris screamed. “Yes!”

“No. It has nothing to do with the trip,” Dory said. “Besides, I thought you were enjoying yourself now?”

Iris shrugged. “Sometimes.”

“I'm enjoying myself. Mostly,” Marshall said. “But maybe I won't be after you tell us about the thing we aren't going to like.”

“Yeah, tell us,” Iris said.

The waitress brought our eggs and corn muffins and slowly refilled Dory's coffee cup as we all watched and waited. The minute she turned around, Dory said, “I'm taking you both out of the Forest Hill School.”

“What?” Iris was so incredulous she was almost laughing.

“I thought I was
already
out?” Marsh said.

“Well, that's just it. I had to find another school for you, anyway, and when I went to visit the Russell School it seemed like a wonderful place, and it's so near our building you can
walk
there . . .”

“Russell? That's not a private school,” Iris said.

“No, it isn't, but it's a fine school in spite of that.”

“Do they have art classes?” Marshall said. “I'm not going if I can't take art.”

Dory leaned eagerly across the table. “They have a wonderful art program. That was one of the things I really liked about it.”

Marsh shrugged. “Well, I don't care then. I mean, I have to go someplace new anyway. Besides, Robin goes to public school.” He grinned at me as if he was happy we'd have something in common.

“You don't really mean that
I'm
going to the Russell School, too, do you?” Iris asked, a look of near hysteria forming on her face.

Dory looked her daughter right in the eyes. “Yes, Iris, that's exactly what I mean. Marsh will be in the Middle School and you'll start Russell High. They're right next to each other, so you can walk to school together.”

Iris's eyes grew enormous. “Well, I'm
not.
No way! You can't make me go there. I won't!”

“Sweetheart, I'm not paying tuition at Forest Hill, so you can't
go
there.
I need you to try to be sensible about this. You know I'm starting back to work in the fall and I can't drive you out to the suburbs every day for school.”

“I'll find another way to get there then. I'm not going to Russell!” Iris insisted through clenched teeth.

“The truth is, Iris, we can't afford the tuition for private school anymore. Not if I'm going to pay for your colleges, too.”

“Let Marsh go, if he wants to. He's the one who screwed up last year! I'm doing great at Forest Hill! That's where all my friends are!” Her face was so red she looked like she was going to burst into flames.

“I realize that, honey. But this is your first year of high school; a lot of other kids will be new, too. It won't be hard to make new friends. I know you don't want to leave Forest Hill, but we have to make some mature decisions now.” Dory put her hand on Iris's arm, but Iris shrugged it off and jumped up.

“Well, this is the dumbest decision I ever heard of, and I'm not doing it!” She stormed out of the restaurant and stood outside kicking the tires and belting the bumpers on the minivan while the rest of us picked at our breakfast.

Marshall smeared jelly on his muffin and licked the knife. “I liked Forest Hill, too. It was a good school.”

“I know,” Dory said.

“Except for Mrs. Marvin. She was an asshole.”

Dory was so shocked she choked on her coffee. Marsh smiled, and then Dory and I started to laugh and couldn't stop.

“Oh, God, she really
was,
wasn't she?” Dory said.

That cheered us up a little bit, but we all knew the ride down to Texas was going to be pretty joyless with Iris so angry. I guess she couldn't believe the rest of us stayed in the air-conditioning, ate our breakfast, and came out smiling, when she'd been standing there starving in the hot sun for fifteen minutes in order to make
her point. She slammed into the backseat and jammed on her headphones. When Marshall accidentally bumped her getting his pencils from a bag on the floor, she elbowed him in the side. Even Marsh knew better than to escalate
that
war—he curled into his own corner and we drove on.

The landscape became a lot flatter, and a lot dustier, too. We had to drive back eastward a little bit into Lamar, Colorado, and then through a corner of the Oklahoma panhandle (the skinny part of the state that looks like a ruler) to get down to Amarillo, where we were headed. It was a little depressing to think we were going east again. I really wanted to be going west, getting closer to . . . what? My dad? California? The end of the trip? All of those things, I guess. And, of course, the end of the summer, too, which meant seeing Chris again.

The thing that was starting to seem the strangest, though, was the idea that I'd be seeing Dad again in a week or so. That had been more my goal than California from the beginning. But what would it be like to step into his house? To sit at his dinner table with his wife? To meet my baby brother who didn't even know me?

When I thought about Dad opening the door, what I'd say to him, what he'd say to me, it made my knees weak. I almost wished we could skip Arizona so I could relax and stop worrying about it, but I also knew if Dory told me we
weren't
stopping, I'd be disappointed and unhappy. In other words, I was as confused about my dad as ever.

By mid-afternoon we pulled into the Big Steer Resort just outside Amarillo. It was an enormous place, a lot fancier than the Lazy River Ranch, but hokier, too. For instance, when you checked in, they handed everybody a “yellow rose of Texas.” The swimming pool was shaped like a big cow, and the restaurant had rattlesnake on the menu. That kind of thing.

But they did have stables, and Iris disappeared into them as
soon as possible while the rest of us enjoyed the cow-pool. By the next morning she was still speaking only when absolutely necessary, so Dory let her take a morning trail ride while the rest of us drove into Amarillo and wandered around the livestock auction and a snake museum.

We were all in agreement on one thing: we wanted to see the Cadillac Ranch that afternoon. It's not really a ranch—it's just a place out in the middle of some wheat fields where, back in the seventies, a group of artists stuck ten old Cadillacs in the dirt, nose first, tail fins in the air. I'd seen pictures of it before and it seemed like such a weird thing to do, I wanted to see it for real. The desk clerk at Big Steer told us to buy some spray paint before we went because part of the idea is to put your own “art” on the cars, or at least your name. We stopped at a hardware store and got ourselves some primary colors and black, which Marshall insisted on, for outlining.

Cadillac Ranch looks best from a distance, I think. Like a bunch of cars just flew in all together and made crash landings. If I'd done it, though, I would have buried the backs of the cars so it looked like they were all growing up from underground, like alien plants, or steel trees or something. For a while we just walked around the cars, reading all the graffiti messages and looking at the pictures people had painted. It was hard to know where to put your own message because you felt bad covering up somebody else's. I finally just put my name on a back fender, low down. Dory wasn't interested in painting; she just took pictures, but Iris and Marshall went a little nuts.

Iris took the red paint first and sprayed
Iris Tewksbury: goddess
all across the roof of a car, then took the blue and yellow cans and decorated the words with shadows and curlicues.

Dory took her picture standing next to it, and (in an obvious attempt to butter her up) said, “I had no idea you were so artistic,
Iris.” The silent treatment must have been starting to get to Dory.

“There's lots you don't know about me,” Iris spit back.

Please. Whenever I started to think there might actually be a human being under all that hair, Iris turned back into a pod person. I walked down the row to see the car Marsh was decorating. Uh-oh. Dory wasn't going to like this one. Along a tail fin he'd painted two cars crashing head-on, the occupants either falling out of windows or flying through the air. The color red had been lavishly applied.

“What do you think?” he asked me.

“I think you draw as well with a spray can as you do with a pencil.”

“Mom won't like it.”

“Probably not.”

“It's just a drawing. It's not like I want it to happen.”

“I know.”

“You can't draw a dog or some
flowers
or something on a car!”

I laughed. “You're right.”

Dory was approaching, camera at the ready. “What are you two laughing about?” she asked, obviously hoping to join in. She stopped and stared at Marshall's drawing.

“Well . . .” she said, smiling weakly. “I guess you just like drawing blood, don't you?”

“Yeah!” Marsh said, happy that at last his mother got it. “Especially when I have red paint like this. I wish I could spray paint
our
car.”

Dory put a hand on his shoulder and smiled. “Dream on, my dear. Dream on.”

“Let's go!” Iris called. “I want to have some time at the mall.”

Dory rolled her eyes. “Sorry, guys. I promised Iris we'd stop at that mall we saw on the way back to the Big Steer.”

“A mall? Do they only have clothes stores?” Marshall made a face.

“I think there was a toy store, too.”

“All right! Let's go!” He and Iris raced back to the minivan.

I was not a big fan of malls. I never had much money to spend, anyway, so why waste my time walking up and down inside a stuffy mall? But I could tell right away what this was all about. Dory was trying to buy back Iris's good humor for the cost of a couple of new outfits. Of course she was perfectly willing to buy stuff for me, too, but I wouldn't let her. The swimming suit was bad enough. It made me uncomfortable the way Dory just flashed credit cards around. It was so easy. Did these people really even want the things they bought, or was shopping just something they did to pass the time?

Even Chris used to do it. He had closets full of clothes already, but he'd wander around some ridiculously overpriced mall store buying sweaters and shirts he didn't need, just because he
could.
I never really understood that.

I volunteered to go with Marshall to the toy store so I wouldn't have to watch Iris take advantage of her mother. Marsh was disappointed that Dory gave him only twenty dollars, but he didn't argue. The toy store had a model train set up and we played with it for half an hour instead of looking at the other toys. I don't think Marsh really wanted anything, anyway, but then, when I said it was time to go meet Dory and Iris, he looked around quickly and grabbed a small telescope from a shelf.

“Do you really want a telescope?” I asked.

“Sure, why not? Look, it costs nineteen dollars so it's just right.”

“Will you even use it?”

He gave me a funny look. “I don't know. I might.”

“I just think it's silly to buy things you don't really want.”

“I have to buy
something,
” he said, shaking his head at me as though I didn't understand his role in keeping the economy afloat.

On the way back to the Big Steer, Dory asked Iris to show me what she'd bought. Iris sighed and reached down into the large bag she'd lugged to the car. She hauled out a lacy tank top, two pairs of pants and a tiny flowered dress.

“And we got shoes, too!” Dory said proudly, as though there had been some difficulty involved in the getting of these things, as if they'd
fished
for them or something.

“Just regular sandals,” Iris said, unwilling to unfurl another bag for show-and-tell.

“They're beautiful!” Dory raved. “Red sling backs.”

“I wish they'd had them in black.
You're
the one who likes red so much,” Iris said scornfully, making clear to Dory that the battle had not quite been won. Money could buy shoes, and shoes might cheer you up a little, but it was obviously going to take more than a new wardrobe to make it up to Iris for Dory's betrayal.