On the morning of the second day, studying the course AAA had charted for us, she said, "I don"t know why they want us to go around all these cities. The road we"re on goes straight through. Why burn all that extra gas?" Her question got answered that afternoon in Indiana when we decided to ignore AAA"s advice to loop around Indianapolis. Immediately we found ourselves locked in a sea of angry city commuters, and to my complete surprise the right-hand lane was no longer ideal, because it would end abruptly, forcing us to exit-or, rather, another driver would have. I, however, had no intention of getting off for the simple reason that we didn"t want to. Putting on my left-turn blinker, I simply held my course, in effect creating my own lane, until one of the drivers in the lane I was determined to merge with, fearing death or dismemberment, let me in. "What a good driver you"re becoming," my mother said every time we didn"t have a wreck, and I couldn"t tell if she was trying to bolster my confidence or actually meant it.
What we worried about even more than accidents were the interstate on-ramps. The Death, underpowered to begin with and further slowed by the U-Haul, simply wasn"t up to them. I"d get up the best head of steam I could and keep the accelerator pressed to the floor as I entered the ramp, but then there was nothing to do but watch the speedometer inch backward-20, 18, 15, 11-until finally our forward momentum wouldn"t even register at all and the car would begin to shudder violently. "Come on, Bess," my mother would whisper, patting the metal dashboard encouragingly, terrified that we"d come to a complete halt and block the long line of cars behind us, "you can do it." (She refused to call our getaway car the Death and became irritated when I did.) All the way to Arizona, our lives were ruled by ramps. We had to get on and off the interstate several times a day, but no matter how low we were on gas, or how hungry we were, or how badly my mother needed to pee, if the exit"s ramps, whether off or back on, looked too severe we kept on driving until we found one with a gentler incline. At day"s end we avoided the busy exits where we"d have a choice of places to stay and eat, opting instead for more remote ones where there"d be a lone Holiday Inn that had an on-site restaurant, because once we were done for the day, there was no chance we"d be getting back in the car before morning. We parked in the farthest, darkest reaches of the motel"s parking lot, taking up three or four s.p.a.ces, because our one absolutely inviolable rule was to never, for any reason, put the Death in reverse. One morning early on I"d wasted a good hour trying to back out of the s.p.a.ce we"d taken near the motel"s front entrance. No one had told me that backing a trailer would be counterintuitive, and before I"d figured that out I"d jackknifed the U-Haul so completely that the two cars to my left were utterly hemmed in. We"d had to enlist the help of the desk clerk to locate and rouse from their slumbers the drivers of the two vehicles on my right so I could extricate us by means of a forward gear.
My other great concern was the temperature gauge, especially in the afternoon when the July heat was worst and the needle crept slowly up into the red danger range. Then we"d have to pull over at a rest stop and let the ticking engine cool down. When I couldn"t find one in time and radiator steam began to billow from under the hood, the only solution was to pull onto the shoulder and wait for an hour in the broiling sun. What I didn"t like thinking about was that we still hadn"t crossed the Mississippi. What would happen when we hit the desert and the temperature soared into the hundreds? Standing there beside the interstate, wilting in the brutal heat, the steady stream of air-conditioned cars and professionally maintained trucks whizzing by and blowing angry gales of dust in our faces, we must have looked utterly forlorn. Surprisingly few people stopped to offer a.s.sistance, and those who did we quickly sent packing. Everything was fine, we told them. No, we didn"t need a tow. We were just waiting a bit for the engine to cool down, and then we"d be on the road again. We didn"t want complete strangers to know our true plight, or that we were losing heart with each pa.s.sing mile.
I kept expecting my mother to throw in the towel. As soon as she did, I was prepared to pack it in and return home. I"d find a job and put off college until the following year. Or maybe I"d contact my father. You never could tell with him. Sometimes he"d just happen to have what you needed, and if he had the money he"d buy me a plane ticket to Arizona or help get me on a road-construction crew if he didn"t. But my mother knew me as well as I knew her, so she had to know what was going through my brain, and the closest she ever came to calling it quits was to remark, at the end of one of those long, hot, dusty, scarifying days, "Ah, Ricko-Mio. When are we going to catch a break?" As if our problem were bad luck.
Not long after, though, our luck did change, in the Ozarks of all places, where a gas station attendant with the smallest head I"d ever seen on an adult sold us a brown canvas water bag shaped like a pancreas that he swore would solve our radiator problem. As near as I could tell from his toothless explanation, offered up as he attached the thing to the Galaxie"s bug-splattered grille, the hot outside air would be cooled as it pa.s.sed through the bag, the cooler air then blowing directly onto the radiator. I had my doubts, but the gadget seemed to rea.s.sure my mother, who now had only entrance and exit ramps, reverse gear, wrong turns, and running out of money before we got to Arizona to worry about. First thing each morning, and every time we stopped for gas, I refilled the bag with cool water as quickly and un.o.btrusively as I could, hoping no one would ask what on earth I was doing and oblige me to repeat, this time with added consonants, the pump jockey"s rationale. But guess what? The car stopped overheating. Then, a couple days later in the Texas Panhandle, somebody actually stole the bag when we stopped for lunch. This was a blow to my mother, whose excellent opinion of people outside of Fulton County was being rubbed raw by actual experience of them, but the theft cheered me considerably, suggesting as it did that there were apparently other idiots in the world. They weren"t all in our car. Over the next several days, though, every time we stopped for gas in the parched southwestern desert, my mother inquired of the attendant whether they sold those great water bags, the ones you attached to the grille to keep car radiators cool. Even after she patiently described the bag"s size and shape and color, n.o.body seemed to know what she was talking about. Apparently you could buy them only in Missouri from congenital nitwits.
MY MOTHER"S NEW JOB at the General Electric plant in Phoenix had always sounded a little vague to me. When I asked what she"d be doing there, if there"d be any correlation between her new duties and the work she"d done in the computer room in Schenectady, or how much of a pay cut she was taking, she said she"d find out all that when we arrived. The main thing, she added, was that the people were nice. Her new boss was somebody she knew, sort of, having talked with him on the phone, off and on, for years, and he was always saying how great it would be if she came out west. She spoke of him in the same tone of voice she used to describe the men she occasionally dated at GE, which might be why I never pressed her for details. Maybe they"d met in Schenectady. Maybe this was one of the guys who"d taken her out for lunch. I didn"t want to know, that"s for sure. Whatever her reasoning, she seemed confident that any salary or tenure she lost as a result of the move, she would quickly be able to make up. After all, the Schenectady plant was GE"s flagship, and in lowly Phoenix she"d surely be recognized as someone who knew how things were done in the big leagues. She just hoped she could start work immediately because, well, the trip had cost more than she"d planned, and she didn"t want to tap the emergency fund any more than she absolutely had to. Right around the corner there"d be first and last month"s rent on her new apartment, and when you went grocery shopping that first time it was always extra expensive because you needed to get everything: salt, pepper, a two-pound bag of flour, wax paper, you name it. And she"d have to pay for her ride to work, just as she"d always done.
Nor was it just money that was in short supply. Time was also of our particular essence. In a couple weeks I"d be heading to Tucson to register for my fall semester cla.s.ses and check into my dorm. My mother was a list maker, and the to-do items on the list she"d started back in Gloversville and updated periodically during our journey-find an apartment she could afford, move in, return the U-Haul and collect the deposit, open a bank account, set up phone and utilities, locate a grocery store within walking distance, find a new doctor-all had to be checked off before I headed south in the car.
As my mother obsessed about all these tasks, I became increasingly apprehensive, not so much because the list was long and time was short, but because she herself seemed so keyed up. After all, our harrowing journey was behind us. Against all odds-we didn"t even know enough to calculate them when we left Helwig Street-we"d somehow made it. The Gray Death hadn"t killed us, and neither, miraculously, had I. We"d done the hard part, hadn"t we? Once we got close to Phoenix, my mother had contacted our relatives, and they"d offered to let us stay with them for a few days until we settled in, and they proved a wealth of information about the area. Sure, there was a lot left to do, but unlike the journey itself none of it was likely to kill us. So, why was my mother behaving as if the tough part was only now beginning? The reason was that she hadn"t written down on any list the most important thing she had to do: Find A Job.
In fairness, some part of her thought she had one. Not in the sense that an actual job had been offered and she"d accepted it, or that there"d been any discussion of things like salary or hours or a start date, and certainly not in the sense that there were any supporting doc.u.ments. More like, If you"re ever out this way, look us up. Or, We could sure use somebody like you out here. Her having a job there was essentially a reasonable conjecture, a deduction based on available data. Telling my grandparents that she had a job in Arizona wasn"t a lie, exactly. It wasn"t that she didn"t have a job, only that she didn"t have one yet. A matter of semantics, surely. She was confident about both her marketable skills and her considerable experience, and that when she presented herself to the man with whom she"d chatted so pleasantly on the phone, he"d recognize her value and find something for her. Having spent his entire working life in Gloversville"s skin mills, my grandfather couldn"t be expected to understand how things worked out in the wider world, in a big company like General Electric. GE people looked out for one another.
But mostly I think my mother believed she had that job in Phoenix because she needed it so badly. Because if she didn"t have it, then doing what we"d just done was beyond folly. Because without a job waiting for her out west, when I went off to college she"d be left behind on Helwig Street. Because she was in her mid-forties now and still an attractive woman, but for how much longer? And more to the point, how long was any person with hopes and dreams expected to remain in a cage, without hope, without a life to call her own? She had the job in Phoenix because without it she was finished. Because for my sake she"d stuck it out in Gloversville as long as she could, and she couldn"t stand it a moment longer. She just couldn"t. And so she had a job.
THE GE FACILITY WAS located on the other side of Phoenix, even then, in 1967, an obscenity of urban sprawl. It was more of an outpost than anything, and I could see my mother"s face fall when she saw how small it was, about the size of an automobile dealership. She"d dressed with great care that morning, but it was already close to a hundred degrees out, and in the hour it had taken us to drive there her hair and clothes were limp. Even more discouraging were the people emerging from and entering the facility, the women dressed in slacks and casual tops and sneakers, the men in jeans and shirts with snaps instead of b.u.t.tons. A few even wore cowboy hats. One of these pointed my mother to an office door into which she disappeared on her high heels. I found a shady spot, expecting to roast there awhile in the punishing heat, but less than five minutes later she returned. The man who"d encouraged her to come by if she was ever in the area hadn"t worked there for a year. In his place was a woman who informed my mother that not only were there no openings but also none were antic.i.p.ated. Theirs was a very small operation, and almost everyone who worked there had done so forever. If she"d had such a good job in Schenectady, why did she leave it?
For a few minutes we just sat in the car and let the blazing desert sun bake us. I saw my mother"s hands were shaking. I was about to ask what she meant to do now, when she said, "How can anyone even think in heat like this?"
We went to an air-conditioned coffee shop and sat in a window booth, our wet clothes sticking to the vinyl cushions. Outside, the heat shimmered in waves off the pavement. Everything was singed brown, even the weeds pushing up through cracks in the sidewalks. "What an awful, awful place," my mother remarked, more to herself than me. "All that way we came."
I was inclined to agree, but pointed out that we"d been in Phoenix less than twenty-four hours, perhaps not long enough to pa.s.s judgment.
"I can tell you one thing," she said, finally turning to face me, and there was something wild in her eyes, something so desperate it bordered on rabid. I"d seen it, or something like it, a few times before, usually when she was at wit"s end and instead of helping I, her only ally, did or said something to make things even worse. At such times it seemed to occur to her that maybe I"d been enlisted in the swelling ranks of those determined to thwart her. Who knew? Maybe I"d always been against her. "I can tell you one thing," she repeated, challenging me to disagree. "I"m not going back."
EVENTUALLY SHE DID, of course, just as my grandparents had foretold, but by then a lot had happened, some of it predictable but mostly not, at least not by me. Sitting across from my mother in that Phoenix coffee shop, I couldn"t even have predicted the next two weeks, at the end of which she and I would once again put the Gray Death on the road, minus the U-Haul this time, for the relatively short trip down to Tucson, where over the next decade, I would complete both an undergraduate and several graduate degrees, and where I would meet a girl named Barbara whom I had the good sense to fall in love with and, once I"d overruled her better judgment, marry. In Tucson I would become a man, a husband, a scholar, a father, and a writer.
In the summer of 1967, however, I was still a boy and my mother"s son, and the University of Arizona larger and more populous than my hometown. I wasn"t the boy who"d left Gloversville a month earlier, though. Nor, I think, was my mother the same woman. We"d become seasoned, fearless travelers and found first the U of A and then the dorm to which I"d been a.s.signed (Apache Hall, I still remember), without difficulty or incident. There I met my roommate, an Arizonan who"d grown up in a small, G.o.dforsaken mining town he seemed proud of as only a small-town boy can be. To me, it sounded like the local equivalent of an upstate New York mill town. My mother garrulously told him all about where we were from, and from her description you never would"ve guessed that for her Gloversville held anything but the fondest of memories. Later, the kid told me he thought she was cool. In fact, motherwise, I"d lucked out. Definitely. He"d have continued in this vein, I suspect, if I hadn"t cut him off.
We were broke, of course, so that night my mother and I ate dinner at a chain coffee shop near the interstate, a dead ringer for the one in Phoenix we"d retreated to after she learned she wouldn"t be working for GE anymore. There was a pay phone outside, so we called my grandparents to let them know that this final leg of our journey had been successfully completed and I was registered for all my cla.s.ses, which would begin next week. I gave them the number of the phone at the end of the hall in my dorm so they could reach me if they needed to. And of course they had my mother"s new number in Phoenix. "How good they were to us," she said over dinner, and I understood from this that she"d begun the process of forgetting those last terrible weeks on Helwig Street. Hearing my grandfather struggle for breath on the telephone brought home to her not just how much she loved him but how much she"d depended on him, and her remark about how good they"d been to us was really about the whole of the last eighteen years. "I don"t know what we would"ve done without them," she said, as close as she"d ever come to admitting that we hadn"t been wholly self-sufficient living under their roof and how secretly worried she was about losing the safety net they"d provided. "He was always my rock," she continued, her eyes br.i.m.m.i.n.g, "from the time I was a little girl," letting her voice fall, but not completely. "You"re that rock now."
If it had occurred to me that she actually meant this, I"d have protested, because I didn"t feel like anybody"s rock, including my own. I was also acutely aware that for the last eighteen years the only rock I"d been was the one around her neck, threatening to pull her under. And if she was worried about the future, she had me for company. That afternoon I"d opened a checking account with a couple hundred dollars, money that would have to last me through the first semester, and in my pocket was a cafeteria meal ticket that would keep me from starving. I couldn"t think of a single thing I had that would be of the slightest use if my mother ran into trouble. My two suitcases were full of clothes that were stylish back home but would brand me as a hated easterner out here in the desert, where the frat-boy uniform was cowboy boots, b.u.t.ton-down oxford shirts, and jeans with b.u.t.ton flies. I"d have all I could do not to become a figure of fun. My numerous misgivings about coming this far to study in what amounted to a foreign country must have been obvious to my mother. She might even have suspected I"d have done a straight-up swap to be enrolling back at SUNY Albany, where I"d know people and could hop on a bus and be home in Gloversville in an hour. So when my mother said that I was now her rock I a.s.sumed she was just expressing some kindly sunrise-sunset, swiftly-flow-the-years sentiment meant to buck me up in the face of new challenges.
She wasn"t.
THE COFFEE-SHOP MELTDOWN in Phoenix turned out to be the nadir. Somehow my mother gathered herself, and we returned to Scottsdale, to the home of the people who were putting us up and in whose yard our detached U-Haul now sat, its ball hitch burrowing into their desert landscaping like an anteater"s snout. My mother found an excuse to go straight to bed, where she slept around the clock. Bright and early the next morning, though, we set about crossing items off her revised to-do list, at the top of which she"d now written JOB.
The first major piece of the puzzle to fall into place was an apartment. Phoenix, a stunningly horizontal city, was even then deeply committed to both unplanned sprawl and the primacy of automobiles, policies that remain unquestioned to this day as far as I know. New apartment houses with acres of parking were springing up everywhere in an attempt to keep up with the influx of midwestern s...o...b..rds. Their construction was shabby, but to easterners used to the grit and grime born of punishing winters they felt new and clean. Several complexes that were only half built offered a free month or two to anyone willing to sign a year"s lease, and that put pressure on older, established properties to cut similar deals. My mother picked a place on Indian School Road that was reasonably close to most of what she"d need, though of course nothing was walking distance, a moot point since there were no sidewalks. Perhaps because it was so hot and gas was nineteen cents a gallon, people preferred to get in their cars even when their destination was just a block or two away.
She could"ve gotten by with a studio apartment, but my mother rented a one bedroom so I"d have at least a couch to crash on when I visited. She had to come up with the usual first and last month"s rent, but after that her next check wasn"t due until November, which seemed a long way off. To her surprise and delight, almost everybody in the complex was newly divorced and recently arrived from somewhere else, men seeming to outnumber women three to one. All of which made sense when you thought about it. In most divorces it would be the man who found himself without a roof over his head, and most of these guys wanted to put at least a few miles between themselves and the wives who"d told them to hit the bricks. n.o.body seemed to have much money or to care much about it. There were a few flashy sports cars in the parking lot, but just as many beaters. In the interior courtyard was a large swimming pool with a communal grill where people congregated in the evenings after changing into bathing suits and grabbing a cold beer. On Sat.u.r.days, around midday, somebody would appear on the pool deck with a pitcher of margaritas and give a rebel yell. People would then spill out of their apartments, blinking in the bright sun like prisoners released from their cells by an invisible warden. Then the weekend festivities would begin.
It must"ve been pretty close to the kind of life my mother had been imagining back in Gloversville. She also must"ve felt like she"d arrived in the nick of time, because most of her neighbors were younger, in their thirties, but they welcomed her like the bunch of good-natured drunks they were. "New blood!" one bare-chested young fellow called up to us from the barbecue pit, his gleaming spatula raised in triumph, when we moved my mother"s stuff into her second-floor apartment within hours of signing the lease. "Where you from?"
"Upstate New York," my mother called over the railing. She hadn"t caught on yet that here in Arizona, hailing from back east was more likely to elicit derision than admiration.
"Well, Jean," he said, after they"d exchanged first names, "you"re better off here. How do you like your burgers?" When she told him, he said to come down when we finished lugging boxes, then pointed his greasy spatula at me. "Bring your husband with you."
The next morning we dropped the trailer off at the nearest U-Haul facility where a HELP WANTED sign was taped to the cash register. "Not for here," the man behind the counter said, as if he feared my mother had designs on his job. "At the headquarters."
These were again located all the way across town, so we drove directly there, my mother having learned her lesson about dressing up for job interviews, and when she disappeared inside I again found a shady spot where I could plan, with the aid of a map of Phoenix, the rest of our day. My mother wasn"t very good at sequencing the items on her to-do list. She always wanted to attend to things in the order of their importance, without taking geographical proximity and other natural progressions into account. I"d only just begun when she reappeared. "Where"s that list?" she said. When I handed it to her, she crossed out JOB. "No kidding?" I said. No kidding. She"d been hired on the spot as a bookkeeper. The pay was s.h.i.tty, but Arizona was a virulently antiunion, right-to-work state where the idea of a living wage had yet to be introduced. There were lots and lots of c.r.a.ppy, low-paying jobs, however, and the possibility of rapid advancement. I think what really sold her on this one, though, was that it was located straight down Indian School Road, so that even with her lousy sense of direction she wouldn"t get lost. Turn right to go to work, turn left and return home. Easy as pie.
That was the other complication, naturally. My car wasn"t mine anymore. "I wish there was some other way," she"d said the morning after her coffee-shop meltdown. But of course I"d seen it coming. The people we"d been staying with had explained when my mother mentioned I"d be taking the car down to Tucson that people in Phoenix didn"t carpool. Or ride the bus, or take a train. If you needed to go anywhere, you climbed in your own car and you took off. If your wife needed to go somewhere, she got into her own car and she took off. You"d no more go two to a car than two to a horse. "But isn"t that kind of, well ... stupid?" I remember asking. "Welcome to Arizona," I was told.
So, since I didn"t really need a car at the university anyway, we located the nearest branch of the Department of Motor Vehicles, got my mother a learner"s permit, and scheduled the written and driving exams for a week later. What we"d do if she failed either one we tried our best not to think about. With nothing but Camelback Mountain to go around and a few dry arroyos to go over, Phoenix wasn"t a bad place to learn to drive. It was laid out on a grid, and its streets were wide and flat. To us, every intersection looked like every other intersection, but you could see for long distances, so it was possible to use the few landmarks that stood out to orient yourself. There was the heat, of course. Since the Death had neither air-conditioning nor power steering, we waited until late in the day for her driving lessons. For the first few evenings we practiced on quiet, residential streets and abandoned strip-mall parking lots. My mother was not a gifted student, but in her defense it must"ve been hard to learn such a basic skill so late in life and to be taught by someone who, in the normal scheme of things, you"d be teaching. Nor was I the most patient instructor. The fact that she"d never driven was one thing, but her ignorance of fundamental principles was so profound it seemed willful. She didn"t notice street signs until I pointed them out to her. Worse, she was p.r.o.ne to panic. Once, when we were working on parallel parking, she forgot she was in reverse and accelerated when she felt the car moving backward, thinking that more gas was called for-despite my screaming, "Brake! Brake!"-and remained fully committed to this misconception until we plowed backward through somebody"s front yard and totaled a saguaro cactus. The next day I couldn"t coax her back behind the wheel without making two promises-that we"d give parallel parking a pa.s.s for a day or two and that, no matter what she did, I wouldn"t yell at her.
Gradually, we moved from the relative safety of residential neighborhoods out onto busy Indian School Road. As time grew short we embarked on real-life outings with genuine purposes, to the supermarket or the drugstore. She always parked in the most remote reaches of the lot, where she was unlikely to encounter other cars or need to use reverse gear. We made a couple practice runs to her new place of employment, first during off-hours, then under more realistic rush-hour conditions. She got better. Not good-that would never happen-but hardly the menace her son had been a month earlier, towing a trailer down the interstate. At once terrified and game, she gripped the wheel as if expecting a sudden impact at any moment, and I came to realize that fear was probably her best defense against catastrophe. To see my mother grabbing hold like that was to understand that her mind, unlike that of 99 percent of drivers who were far more skilled and experienced, would never wander, even for an instant, from the task at hand.
On the morning of her road test she took an extra half pill with her coffee so her hands wouldn"t shake, and by the time we arrived at the Department of Motor Vehicles, she was wearing a smile so serene that I feared her examiner would take in at a glance that she was pharmaceutically impaired, but he didn"t. While they were gone I mentally drafted a contingency plan to call the university registrar and say I"d be a week or two late and beg them please, please, not to give my dorm room away. What I dreaded most was having to explain what was happening. No, I couldn"t predict exactly when I"d be joining my cla.s.smates, as it kind of depended on when my mother pa.s.sed her driver"s test. What if I were asked to a.s.sess her chances? Or if the registrar wanted to know how it was that a woman in her forties in this day and age had never driven a car until two weeks ago? Would he have my file on his desk as we spoke? Would he say, Oh, right-Russo. The one from Gloversville. No wonder. I was still working on my side of this imaginary conversation when I heard my mother"s laughter from all the way across the room. She tossed her head girlishly as she approached, with her examiner, a small man a good fifteen years her junior, as firmly in tow as a dog on a leash. "And this is my son," she was saying, "the one I"ve been telling you about."
"Your mom did fine," the man said as we shook hands. "She didn"t run over a single cactus."
Then he wished her luck on her new job, and they shook hands, and he and I shook hands again, one big happy, complicit family. "What a nice man," my mother said when we parted, loud enough for him to hear.
To celebrate, we went to a restaurant for lunch, and my mother ordered a b.l.o.o.d.y Mary.
"You actually told him about backing over that saguaro?" I said.
"He thought that was the funniest thing he"d ever heard. They"re apparently quite expensive."
I"d suspected as much, which was why, after quickly swapping seats, we"d hightailed it out of there and I"d chosen an entirely new neighborhood to practice in when we resumed parallel parking.
She showed me the temporary license she"d been given. "Hey, you know what this means?" I said. "You"re free." Because every fifteen-year-old knows that a driver"s license is really about freedom, and I figured my mother, given how desperately she longed for true independence, would register the symbolism. But she just looked at me strangely. After all, she wasn"t fifteen; she was forty-five, and failing to learn would"ve sent her straight back to Helwig Street.
She wasn"t blind to the magnitude of the moment, though, and when her drink came she reached across the booth and patted my hand. "Ricko-Mio," she said, her smile less serene now, more loopy, "we did it."
Which was true. There were a few small things left on the to-do list, but nothing important or difficult. "You did it," I said. Aware of how much all this had cost her, I was suddenly and unexpectedly proud of her, so proud it didn"t seem to matter that what we"d done was in fact borderline moronic. And part of me understood, too, what this unforeseen pride meant-that like my grandfather, I hadn"t believed she was capable of much of anything, really. I was proud she"d proved us both wrong, but also surprised. "In fact," I said, "seeing where we were a couple weeks ago, I"m not sure how you managed to pull it off."
"Well," she said, looking so deeply inward now that I knew what she"d say next before she said it. "I just gave myself a good talking-to."
ALL THESE YEARS later it seems incredible to me that after helping me get settled at the university she drove back to Phoenix on her own. Not that it was terribly difficult. We could see the I-10 freeway ramp from the restaurant where we ate that last dinner together. She"d get on the interstate and not get off until she came to the Indian School Road exit, and she"d stay on that until she reached her apartment. It was late August, so it was still light out when she left. It would be dark by the time she got to Phoenix, but the traffic wouldn"t be bad. Of course if the Gray Death broke down in the desert she"d be all alone, and even if she could find a pay phone, what possible good would it do to call me? I don"t think I worried about any of that. I"d badly underestimated her, as well as our escape vehicle in recent weeks, and they"d both taught me not to. They"d make it fine.
Indeed, as I walked back to campus along busy Speedway Boulevard, I had a profound sense that my mother"s life and my own had just diverged, probably for good. I"d be with her for Thanksgiving, and again over the Christmas holidays between semesters. But I"d seen my father before leaving Gloversville, and he"d offered to pay my union dues while I was away at school. That way, if I wanted to come home for the summer, I could get a well-paid construction job, and I"d already decided to do just that. Eighteen was legal drinking age in New York, and he"d begun to show more interest in me since my birthday. By next summer my grandparents would have rented the upstairs flat on Helwig Street, but they had a spare bedroom and would be happy to see me. I could paint the house on weekends to save them some money. I already missed both of them terribly, and for the first time felt the full guilt of having abandoned them. Somehow I"d try to set this right.
My mother didn"t factor into any of these plans. Hey, she had the new life she"d wanted for so long. She had people her own age and a nice apartment and parties on weekends and n.o.body looking over her shoulder, second-guessing her every decision and criticizing her for having a little fun. If the Death didn"t die and she got a couple raises, her new ends might just meet. Why shouldn"t things work out for her? After all, Phoenix seemed to be the city of fresh starts, of rising from the ashes. There were lots of single men around. And with me finally out of her way, there"d be opportunities for the kind of romance I knew she craved, maybe even marriage, though I doubted she had much interest in that. She just wanted to dress up and go dancing or out to dinner someplace nice now and then. There was no longer any reason she shouldn"t have her wish. Back in Gloversville, her mantra had always been that we"d be just fine as long as we had each other, but that pact-unsustainable between a mother who would grow old and a son who"d eventually marry and have children of his own-could now be honorably dissolved by both parties. That"s what our long journey across America, all those scary on- and off-ramps, had been about. As she herself had put it, "Ricko-Mio, we did it."
And if we"d done it, it stood to reason that it must be finished, right?
A Diagnosis