The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [15]
I didn’t feel like giving her my whole life story, so I just said, ‘Great Britain.’
‘Well, I’ll tell you one thing, honey,’ she said, ‘for a foreigner you speak English real good.’
Afterwards I retired with a six-pack to my motel, where I discovered that the bed, judging by its fragrance and shape, had only recently been vacated by a horse. It had a sag in it so severe that I could only see the TV at its foot by splaying my legs to their widest extremity. It was like lying in a wheel-barrow. The night was hot and the air conditioner, an aged Philco window unit, expended so much energy making a noise like a steelworks that it could only manage to emit the feeblest and most occasional puffs of cool air. I lay with the six-pack on my chest, effectively immobilized, and drank the beers one by one. On the TV was a talk show presided over by some smooth asshole in a blazer whose name I didn’t catch. He was the kind for whom personal hair care was clearly a high priority. He exchanged some witless banter with the band-leader, who of course had a silvery goatee, and then turned to the camera and said in a solemn voice, ‘But seriously, folks. If you’ve ever had a personal problem or trouble at work or you just can’t seem to get a grip on life, I know you’re gonna be real interested in what our first guest has to tell you tonight. Ladies and gentlemen: Dr Joyce Brothers.’
As the band launched into a perky tune and Joyce Brothers strode onstage, I sat up as far as the bed would allow me and cried, ‘Joyce! Joyce Brothers!’ as if to an old friend. I couldn’t believe it. I hadn’t seen Joyce Brothers for years and she hadn’t changed a bit. Not one hair on her head had altered a fraction since the last time I saw her, droning on about menstrual flow, in 1962. It was as if they had kept her in a box for twenty-five years. This was as close as I would ever come to time travel. I watched agog as she and Mr Smoothie chattered away about penis envy and Fallopian tubes. I kept expecting him to say to her, ‘Now seriously, Joyce, here’s a question all America has been wanting me to ask you: what sort of preparations do you take to keep yourself looking like that? Also, when are you going to do something about that hairstyle? And finally, why is it, do you think, that talk show bozos like me all over America keep inviting you back again and again?’ Because, let’s be frank, Joyce Brothers is pretty dull. I mean, if you turn on the Johnny Carson Show and she is one of the guests you know that absolutely everybody in town must be at some really big party or première. She is like down-state Illinois made flesh.
Still, like most immensely boring things, there is something wonderfully comforting about her. Her cheery visage on the glowing box at the foot of my bed made me feel strangely warm and whole and at peace with the world. Out here in this crudbucket motel in the middle of a great empty plain I began for the first time to feel at home. I somehow knew that when I awoke I would see this alien land in a new but oddly familiar light. With a happy heart, I fell asleep and dreamt gentle dreams of southern Illinois and the rolling Mississippi River and Dr Joyce Brothers. And it’s not often you hear anyone say that either.
Chapter four
IN THE MORNING I crossed the Mississippi at Quincy; somehow it didn’t look as big or majestic as I had remembered it. It was stately. It was imposing. It took whole minutes to cross. But it was also somehow flat and dull. This may have had something to do with the weather, which was likewise flat and dull. Missouri looked precisely the same as Illinois, which had looked precisely the same as Iowa. The only difference was that the car licence plates were a different colour.
Near Palmyra, I stopped at a roadside café for breakfast and took a seat at the counter. At this hour, just after eight in the morning, it was full of farmers. If there is one thing farmers sure do love it