Like Mandarin - Kirsten Hubbard [91]
Momma and I glanced at each other. We thought she’d been napping. “We should have woken her up for the pronghorns,” I said.
“I saw the anter-lopes.”
“Then why didn’t you say anything?”
Taffeta shrugged. “I like listening.”
“So I thought we’d drive back up to Rapid City for supper,” Momma said. “We can get a motel in town. And in the morning … Where to next, Grace? It’s your trip.”
I looked out the window. So far, South Dakota didn’t look that different from Wyoming. “Keep heading east,” I said, putting my knees up against the dash.
I used to wonder what it would look like if all my footsteps were painted red: all the steps I’d ever taken in all the places I’d ever been. There would be one long tendril way out to Seattle, reflecting the time I’d visited my aunt. Scribbles all over Wyoming, from our assorted pageant trips. Everything would converge in Washokey, Wyoming. Footsteps traced and retraced so many times they’d become a dollop of red paint, or a heart in a rib cage of hills.
Maybe it sounded kind of creepy, but I liked the idea—that we left pieces of ourselves everywhere we went, coloring all our important places.
Even if Washokey was the center of them all.
Not long after we passed the state line, we pulled over at a gas station so my sister could use the bathroom. From the car, I snapped a photo as Taffeta reached for Momma’s hand.
Once they disappeared, I climbed out of the car and entered the station. It was exactly like the Sundrop Quik Stop in Washokey, except the key chains and lighters all said South Dakota.
I set the manila envelope on the counter and pried it open. It already bore the address Mandarin had given me on the phone a few days after school had ended.
“Would you like to mail that?” asked the man behind the counter.
“Just one sec.”
As I sifted through the photos—Mandarin lying in the grassy pasture with her hair spread out, hanging off the fence with her elbows on her thighs, wearing the contraband cowboy outfit in the shadowy barn—I wondered yet again where she’d go if it didn’t work out with her mother.
She was always west in my fantasies. Sometimes I pictured her in Hollywood, waiting tables between auditions. Or I imagined her modeling in San Francisco, posing against a postcard background of bridges and fog. In my darker daydreams, I envisioned her standing under streetlights in Las Vegas, leaning against doorways and into cars. Briefly, I had even imagined her lifeless body shattered by waves, or lost in some remoteness of the badlands.
But I didn’t believe it.
Because ever since my last beauty pageant, when Mandarin had caught my wayward lilac bloom and twisted it between her fingers, we’d been linked together. Now I felt her distance, but not her absence. And someday, we might be able to close that gap.
Before I tucked it back inside the manila envelope with the photos, I unfolded the revised version of my essay and skimmed it one last time.
Everybody says the winds in Washokey, Wyoming, make people go crazy. But Washokey isn’t the only place with crazy-making winds.
In California, they’re called the Santa Anas, and they scoop the heat from the high desert and fling it at the coast. In France, they’re called the Mistrals, and they drove Vincent Van Gogh to cut off his ear.
Some people say the ozone gets stirred up or reduced, and we’re breathing in the wrong sort of oxygen as a result. Maybe it’s this wildwind psychosis that makes us do things like put pronghorn antlers on jackrabbit heads and lipstick on little girls.
But whether they’re crazy-making or just annoying, it’s not just the winds that make us crazy to leave. From pioneers setting out across the prairie to mustangs fleeing their Spanish masters, the most American thing about us is our itchy feet. We’re always itching to go, to move on, to escape. We convince ourselves we could truly be happy if only we were somewhere else. Or somebody else.
While it’s smart to plan for the future, we won’t find real happiness if our eyes never leave the horizon. When we’re all rushing off in different directions,