Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [17]
My first antelope. My first Indian. First real mountains, with August snow. Radio signals from every state west of the Rockies, south of Alaska and north of the Canal filled my ears with strange music and revival and call-in complaints. At night, all Spanish. I didn’t see a tree for two days, and then came the downscale sublime Utah! The state had an exclamation point on its license plates like it was its own musical. Seven brides for one horny brother? Salt flats, miles in every direction, which I walked on, fell down on and stuck my tongue on, Hey, where’s the ketchup? You shoulda seen that French fry! I bet myself the next state had to be California because my money was thin by then, but it turned out to be Nevada, even drier and emptier, where gas stations and 7-Elevens had slot machines and “ranch” meant “whorehouse,” which I discovered when I drove into one looking for cowboys. Probably lots of those cowgirls working the ranches had more than arson in their pasts. I made forty dollars on the slots crossing the state.
California sure knew how to make an entrance, knew how to keep you waiting. Forget and forgive the stuff they taught in school about the Donner Pass.
After all the dust and emptiness, I was primed.
You are a twenty-three-year-old SWF, I tested myself. You are attractive, and you are street-smart in a Schenectady/Albany sort of way. You have a sense of humor, which gets you dates and jobs. You also have your pride, which, when it gets out of hand, burns down an ex-boyfriend’s house. Given such assets of your looks and character and the liability of your situation, do you:
A. hide out on a Nevada ranch and save your neck until Flash calls off his goon squad?
B. become a Mormon and save your soul?
C. enlist in the Peace Corps and save the world?
D. confront your deadbeat mom?
Luv ya, California! Greetings from Debby Clearwater-Daughter!
I owed it to my family to share my happiness. On an impulse I got off the highway, and from the pay phone of the gas station closest to the exit ramp, I dialed Mama. The phone rang and rang. Pappy didn’t believe in answering machines. So I dialed Angie next. Some jazz group I didn’t recognize came on first, then a man with a whispery voice and an accent I couldn’t place. “You have reached the pad of Egberto and the bella Angela. When two people are in love, answering your call is not a top priority. Leave a message or get a life. Whatever you decide, you have thirty seconds. Oh, and Beth, Ingrid and Manju have moved on to Alberta and couldn’t care less about messages.”
I slapped the pay phone a couple of times with the heel of my palm.
The teenaged attendant shook his head. “I know just how you feel,” he said. “Sometimes that phone don’t work so good.”
I caught the spaced-out smile on his bronzed, benign face. A good mood is a good mood, even when chemically induced. I envied him. I said, as a joke, “Think I should sue the phone company?”
“Why not?” the kid said. He picked a stick of beef jerky out of a jar by the cash register, and peeled its wrap partway. “What do you have to lose? Time’s running out on corporate deep pockets.”
“My sister,” I volunteered, “wants me to get a life.”
The kid took a meditative chew. “Cool,” he said.
“My first time in California, would you believe?”
He pulled another vile-looking stick out of the beef jerky container. “Hey, on the house,” he said. “Have a nice life. Have a nice day the rest of the day.”
I sucked and chewed on the jerky as I got back on the highway. If the world has a finite supply of bad days and nice days, I owed it to myself to grab as many nice ones as I could. Go for bliss. Dump pain, pity and rage on somebody else. Pursue happiness: that’s the American way. Dial the Bay Area branch of Finders/Keepers the next chance you get.