Durable Goods_ A Novel - Elizabeth Berg [37]
For a while when I was younger, I used to pretend-run-away all the time. I would dump my doll out of her suitcase and use it to pack all my underwear in, and go far into a field that was behind the house we lived in then. There I would sit on a big rock and contemplate the distance around me in four directions. I would listen to the buzzing insects, make up ideas for new parents. Mostly they were tall and slender. She had long red hair with a wave over one eye. He had short blond hair and wore a blue blazer with a family crest. They had many kinds of drinking glasses and two servants. “Look at her!” they would say, introducing me to their astonished and jealous friends. “Lost, can you imagine! Turns out she’s real intelligent, too. Why, we just took her right in! Of course it helps that we’re millionaires, but we would have taken her even if we didn’t have one red cent.” I’d heard that phrase, “one red cent,” and it appealed to me. I used it whenever I could.
I never went any farther than the rock. I would sit for a while and then go home. My mother would give me peaches from the can and then together we would put away my underwear. “I’m so glad you’re home,” she would say. “Shall we read a little?” I knew not to let my father catch me running away, even if it was pretend.
And now it is not pretend. It is so real we have a truck and the driver is drinking coffee. Later I might get scared about what will happen when my father finds out. But now there is wide-open night outside the rolled-up windows, the road passing under the two front tires of the truck and out from under the two rear ones. Imagine if I fell out, I think suddenly, and had to watch the taillights get smaller in the dark. Imagine if I had to be all alone somewhere far from anywhere—Texas is scary vast. But I am in the middle, where I couldn’t fall out without someone taking notice. I close my eyes, listen to the drone of the tires on the pavement. It is a high song, and it can hypnotize you in that way where you just can’t move your eyeballs even though you know you are awake. I like when you know you’re going to fall asleep any second. That is the time for the last thoughts of the day to come into your brain like the tail end of a long parade. It’s colors I think of tonight: the corals you see on seashells, the swirls of white through pink on Cherylanne’s lipstick holder, the shy blue of the sky when the day is coming new.
I wake up to the crunch of gravel. Dickie has pulled into the parking lot of The Welcome Inn. Well, the “W” is off the “Welcome,” but what else could it be? It is light outside, but gray, the clouds hanging low and swollen above us. The motel looks like a shoe box, long and narrow with about twelve doors leading to different rooms. The doors are painted yellow, red, green; yellow, red, green. I hope we get a red one. Diane is sound asleep, her head resting against her window. Dickie smiles at me, whispers, “I’ll be right back,” and heads for the room on the end with a sign saying OFFICE leaning against its window. A motel room! For all of us! In the daytime! Already we are making up our own rules for whatever we want. After we get going again, I’ll bet if I want to stop and look at something, Dickie and Diane will say, “Why certainly. Go ahead.” We could never do that before. My father drove and drove and we couldn’t look at anything even if my mother asked. Once she begged him to let us see a cave only one mile off the road. He was quiet for one terrible moment and then he turned to her and said between his teeth, “I am trying to get there. Could you please make some effort to understand that? I am not interested in side trips. I am interested in getting there.” Her earring jiggled a little from her starting to turn toward him. But then she stopped,