We turned east at Everett and climbed into the Cascades. I showed Cynthia our route on the map. First I showed her the map of the whole United States, which showed also the bottom part of Canada. Then I turned to the separate maps of each of the states we were going to pass through. Washington, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin. I showed her the dotted line across Lake Michigan, which was the route of the ferry we would take. Then we would drive across Michigan to the bridge that linked the United States and Canada at Sarnia, Ontario. Home.
Meg wanted to see too.
“You won’t understand,” said Cynthia. But she took the road atlas into the back seat.
“Sit back,” she said to Meg. “Sit still. I’ll show you.”
I could hear her tracing the route for Meg, very accurately, just as I had done it for her. She looked up all the states’ maps, knowing how to find them in alphabetical order.
“You know what that line is?” she said. “It’s the road. That line is the road we’re driving on. We’re going right along this line.”
Meg did not say anything.
“Mother, show me where we are right this minute,” said Cynthia.
I took the atlas and pointed out the road through the mountains, and she took it back and showed it to Meg. “See where the road is all wiggly?” she said. “It’s wiggly because there are so many turns in it. The wiggles are the turns.” She flipped some pages and waited a moment. “Now,” she said, “show me where we are.” Then she called to me, “Mother, she understands! She pointed to it! Meg understands maps!”
It seems to me now that we invented characters for our children. We had them firmly set to play their parts. Cynthia was bright and diligent, sensitive, courteous, watchful. Sometimes we teased her for being too conscientious, too eager to be what we in fact depended on her to be. Any reproach or failure, any rebuff, went terribly deep with her. She was fair-haired, fair-skinned, easily showing the effects of the sun, raw winds, pride, or humiliation. Meg was more solidly built, more reticent — not rebellious but stubborn sometimes, mysterious. Her silences seemed to us to show her strength of character, and her negatives were taken as signs of an imperturbable independence. Her hair was brown, and we cut it in straight bangs. Her eyes were a light hazel, clear and dazzling.
We were entirely pleased with these characters, enjoying their contradictions as well as the confirmations of them. We disliked the heavy, the uninventive, approach to being parents. I had a dread of turning into a certain kind of mother — the kind whose body sagged, who moved in a woolly-smelling, milky-smelling fog, solemn with trivial burdens. I believed that all the attention these mothers paid, their need to be burdened, was the cause of colic, bed-wetting, asthma. I favored another approach — the mock desperation, the inflated irony of the professional mothers who wrote for magazines. In those magazine pieces, the children were splendidly self-willed, hard-edged, perverse, indomitable. So were the mothers, through their wit, indomitable. The real-life mothers I warmed to were the sort who would phone up and say, “Is my embryo Hitler by any chance over at your house?” They cackled clear above the milky fog.
We saw a dead deer strapped across the front of a pickup truck.
“Somebody shot it,” Cynthia said. “Hunters shot the deer.”
“It’s not hunting season yet,” Andrew said. “They may have hit it on the road. See the sign for deer crossing?”
“I would cry if we hit one,” Cynthia said sternly.
I had made peanut-butter-and-marmalade sandwiches for the children and salmon-and-mayonnaise for us. But I had not put any lettuce in, and Andrew was disappointed.
“I didn’t have any,” I said.
“Couldn’t you have got some?”
“I’d have had to buy a whole head of lettuce just to get enough for sandwiches, and I decided it wasn’t worth it.”
This was a lie. I had forgotten.
“They’re a lot better with lettuce.”
“I didn’t think it made that much difference.” After a silence, I said, “Don’t be mad.”
“I’m not mad. I like lettuce on sandwiches.”
“I just didn’t think it mattered that much.”
“How would it be if I didn’t bother to fill up the gas tank?”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“Sing a song,” said Cynthia. She started to sing:
Andrew squeezed my hand and said, “Let’s not fight.”
“You’re right. I should have got lettuce.”
“It doesn’t matter that much.”
I wished that I could get my feelings about Andrew to come together into a serviceable and dependable feeling. I had even tried writing two lists, one of things I liked about him, one of things I disliked — in the cauldron of intimate life, things I loved and things I hated — as if I hoped by this to prove something, to come to a conclusion one way or the other. But I gave it up when I saw that all it proved was what I already knew — that I had violent contradictions. Sometimes the very sound of his footsteps seemed to me tyrannical, the set of his mouth smug and mean, his hard, straight body a barrier interposed — quite consciously, even dutifully, and with a nasty pleasure in its masculine authority — between me and whatever joy or lightness I could get in life. Then, with not much warning, he became my good friend and most essential companion. I felt the sweetness of his light bones and serious ideas, the vulnerability of his love, which I imagined to be much purer and more straightforward than my own. I could be greatly moved by an inflexibility, a harsh propriety, that at other times I scorned. I would think how humble he was, really, taking on such a ready-made role of husband, father, breadwinner, and how I myself in comparison was really a secret monster of egotism. Not so secret, either — not from him.
At the bottom of our fights, we served up what we thought were the ugliest truths. “I know there is something basically selfish and basically untrustworthy about you,” Andrew once said. “I’ve always known it. I also know that that is why I fell in love with you.”
“Yes,” I said, feeling sorrowful but complacent.
“I know that I’d be better off without you.”
“Yes. You would.”
“You’d be happier without me.”
“Yes.”
And finally — finally — wracked and purged, we clasped hands and laughed, laughed at those two benighted people, ourselves. Their grudges, their grievances, their self-justification. We leapfrogged over them. We declared them liars. We would have wine with dinner, or decide to give a party.
I haven’t seen Andrew for years, don’t know if he is still thin, has gone completely gray, insists on lettuce, tells the truth, or is hearty and disappointed.
WE STAYED THE night in Wenatchee, Washington, where it hadn’t rained for weeks. We ate dinner in a restaurant built about a tree — not a sapling in a tub but a tall, sturdy cottonwood. In the early-morning light, we climbed out of the irrigated valley, up dry, rocky, very steep hillsides that would seem to lead to more hills, and there on the top was a wide plateau, cut by the great Spokane and Columbia rivers. Grainland and grassland, mile after mile. There were straight roads here, and little farming towns with grain elevators. In fact, there was a sign announcing that this county we were going through, Douglas County, had the second-highest wheat yield of any county in the United States. The towns had planted shade trees. At least, I thought they had been planted, because there were no such big trees in the countryside.