Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides [229]
Throughout the morning it had drizzled on and off, but now the clouds were breaking up. Across the desperate eatery, through the rain-greased windows and beyond the access road that bounded a strip of sloping littered grass, ran the Interstate. I watched the traffic whizzing along, feeling less hungry now but still lonely and scared. The waitress came over and asked if I wanted coffee. Though I had never had a cup of coffee before, I said yes. After she served it to me, I doctored it with two packets of creamer and four of sugar. When it tasted roughly like coffee ice cream, I drank it.
From the terminal buses were steadily pulling out, leaving gassy trails. Down on the highway cars sped along. I wanted to take a shower. I wanted to lie down in clean sheets and go to sleep. I could get a motel room for $9.95, but I wanted to be farther away before I did that. I sat in the booth for a long time. I couldn’t see my way to the next step. Finally, an idea occurred to me. Paying my bill, I left the bus terminal. I crossed the access road and shuffled down the slope. I set down my suitcase on the shoulder and, stepping out to face the oncoming traffic, tentatively stuck out my thumb.
My parents had always cautioned me against hitchhiking. Sometimes Milton pointed out stories in the newspaper detailing the gruesome ends of coeds who had made that mistake. My thumb was not very high in the air. Half of me was against the idea. Cars sped past. No one stopped. My reluctant thumb was shaking.
I had miscalculated with Luce. I thought that after talking to me he would decide that I was normal and leave me alone. But I was beginning to understand something about normality. Normality wasn’t normal. It couldn’t be. If normality were normal, everybody could leave it alone. They could sit back and let normality manifest itself. But people—and especially doctors—had doubts about normality. They weren’t sure normality was up to the job. And so they felt inclined to give it a boost.
As for my parents, I held them blameless. They were only trying to save me from humiliation, lovelessness, even death. I learned later that Dr. Luce had emphasized the medical risk in letting my condition go untreated. The “gonadal tissue,” as he referred to my undescended testes, often became cancerous in later years. (I’m forty-one now, however, and so far nothing has happened.)
A semi appeared around the bend, blowing black smoke from an upright exhaust pipe. In the window of the red cab the driver’s head was bouncing like the head of a doll on a spring. His face turned in my direction, and as the huge truck roared past, he engaged the brakes. The rear wheels of the cab smoked a little, squealed, and then twenty yards ahead of me the truck was waiting.
Lifting my suitcase, with a wild excitement, I ran up to the truck. But when I reached it I stopped. The door looked so high up. The huge vehicle sat rumbling, shuddering. I couldn’t see the driver from my vantage point and stood paralyzed with indecision. Then suddenly the trucker’s face appeared in the window, startling me. He opened the door.
“You coming up or what?”
“Coming,” I said.
The cab was not clean. He had been traveling for some time and there were food containers and bottles strewn around.
“Your job is to keep me awake,” the trucker said.
When I didn’t respond right away he looked over at me. His eyes were red. Red, too, were the Fu Manchu mustache and the long sideburns. “Just keep talking,” he said.
“What do you want to talk about?”
“Fuck-all if I know!” he shouted angrily. But just as suddenly: “Indians! You know anything about Indians?”
“American Indians?”
“Yeah. I pick up a lot of Injuns when I drive out west. Those are some of the craziest motherfuckers I ever heard. They got all kinds of theories and shit.”
“Like what?”
“Like some of ‘em say they didn’t come over the Bering land bridge. Are you familiar with the Bering land bridge? That’s up there in Alaska. Called the Bering Strait now. It’s water. Little sliver of water between Alaska and Russia. Long