Howard Johnson's, Late Spring
by Elizabeth McCracken
They were in Pennsylvania but Pennsylvania was beside the point, it was five o’clock in the afternoon but that didn’t matter either, it was 1954. Start of June. Indianapolis behind them; New York City ahead. The car was a Chevrolet. As soon as they were anywhere they left it, like time itself. What time is it? Later than it was when you asked. Three of them in the car. One was a son and a husband, one a wife, and one a mother. They passed a sign that said, FOOD—THE CHICKEN COOP—FOOD, and the mother—Evelyn—read it aloud: “The Chicken Coop.” Then she added, “Whaddya know.”
She read it aloud because it felt like a thought though she knew it wasn’t; she could read whole sentences as clearly as she ever did. She could write them, too. Sometimes at home she would write a thought down so she could read it aloud. But here she was in the middle of the back seat, jouncing. No writing while jouncing. She couldn’t spell words in her head which meant she couldn’t read words in her head which meant talking was complicated. She’d had a stroke, she was getting better, she was better than she could make clear.
“Chucken Coop,” she said, knowing that wasn’t right.
“Are you hungry?” her son’s wife asked.
Evelyn hadn’t left Indianapolis in years. The children had kept her home. Now she was old and the children were gone. In the front seat, the wife—though Evelyn wasn’t sure she was a wife; there was something unsettled between the two of them up there—the young woman held an atlas, light blue and in loose geographic order, with a failing binding. If it came apart they would never be able to piece the country together. Pennsylvania took four pages. They had been in it a long time.
“In another hour we can stop for the night,” said her son.
“Phil, maybe your mother—”
“Let’s press on,” he said. Phillip. That’s who he was. Placid, she told herself, green. She pictured the drowsy head of a tree passing over her drowsy head. Tree, tree, tree. Then realized that was what was happening on the other side of the car, the outside. Trees along the road like a colonnade. That word, colonnade, in her head though she knew she could not move it to her mouth and say it. She tried. “Oh, look at the children,” she said.
“What children?” her son said, irritated.
“Yes,” said her son’s wife. “Aren’t they darling.”
The words in her head lived at many levels, like a cutaway illustration of the ocean and all who occupied it. Remote and close up. Quicksilver and pokey. Irretrievable and plentiful. Sometimes they came together in a sentence that she could net and say aloud, but mostly not. Why she liked signs. She could read anything.
Her son’s wife looked into the atlas. “What did the last sign say?”
Evelyn tried to remember, thought, Bird.
“Indian Lake,” her son said. “We should be in New York tomorrow morning. I won’t make it tonight.”
“I could drive,” said his wife.
“You could.”
“At any moment.”
“I know.”
“I could,” said Evelyn, and her son laughed. He was not, she remembered, one of the nice ones. She had eleven children. They were all alive, she wanted to say, but she wasn’t sure. They had all survived childhood. If any were dead, and they might be, it wasn’t her fault.
“Sure,” he said. “But maybe—I think your license has expired.”
“Did you ever drive, Evelyn?” the young woman asked.
“She never did.”
“Really?” said Evelyn. Then, offended, “I’m sure you’re right.” Then, “How long?”
“How long what, Mother.”
“This kidnapping.”
That got the young woman’s attention. She turned around, her hands on the car seat like Kilroy. “Oh, no. Not a kidnapping.”
“Feels like.”
“No,” said the young woman, who had beveled little features Evelyn didn’t trust, nose, lips. “Phil—”
But he shook out his wrists, right one, left, and said nothing.
She was in the middle of the backseat riding through green, more green, darker green now.
“It’s night,” she said.
“Nearly.”
“Where—I forgot.” Then, because she meant it: “Where?”
“We’re taking you to Goldie’s, Mother. She’s got a big apartment. Elevator building. Miriam and Chick and Joseph all live in the city. We’re close by. Good doctors, too.”
“I don’t need a doctor.”
Her son laughed again.
Cars came at them from the other direction. Headlights on now. In the fog, with the rolling hills, the cars looked like they flew down from the sky and landed on the road. Thrilled her every time.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“To Goldie’s.”
“Why Goldie?”
“She can afford it.”
The young woman said, “Phil. You can afford it.”
“Can I?” he said.
“Afford what?” asked Evelyn.
He said, “Goldie misses you. The whole New York crew does. She’s hired a nurse.”
“I don’t need a nurse.”
“If we’re that close,” said the woman, “I can drive. Get us a little nearer, anyhow.”
“You don’t like to drive in the dark.”
“I don’t mind it. It’s not that dark.”
“Getting. Ok. All right. Maybe you drive for half an hour? I’ll nap. We can get a little closer, at least.”
“All right,” she said. “Deal.”
The car bumped, angled off, came to a stop. They were still for the first time in hours. All of Evelyn’s body rattled. “What are we doing?” she asked.
“Changing drivers.”
“For a new one?”
“Constance and I are swapping.”
“That’s nice.” She slid over and opened the door.
“What are you doing, Mother?”
“Getting—”
“We’ll stop a little later,” he said.
For a moment she was alone in the car by the trees, and she thought, I’ll run for it. She could hear them talking outside. The keys were still in the car. She had driven, just not in his memory. The young woman got behind the wheel, and then her son sat on the passenger’s side and pulled the door closed.
“OK, Mother?” he said.
She said, “Why do you call me Mother?”
There was a pause. He said, wounded, “Because you’re my mother.”
“Well for heavens’ sake I know that,” she said.
“All right.”
“I do know it.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“My children call me Mama,” she said. “Aren’t you one of my children?”
“Yes,” he said. “Sure.” Then, in an obnoxious tone she remembered from his childhood, “Which one?”
“Phillip,” she said. She didn’t know she was going to say it before she did.
“That’s right!” said the young woman, turning the car back on.
“Etta, Chick, Shelley, Rita, Phillip, Miriam, Joseph, Sidney, Fannie, Goldie.”
“Ha!” said the young woman. Then: “Was that everyone?”
“I think so,” he said.
“Ha,” said Evelyn. “I don’t remember which one she is.”
“She’s not—”
“Wife,” said Evelyn.
True enough he was the scandal of his family. After a moment, he said, “Third. The best one. Constance.”
“Divorced,” said Evelyn.
“Goldie’s divorced,” said Phillip. “That’s worse.”
“Why worse?”
“Because she’s a girl. She’s a woman.”
His wife said, “Didn’t your divorces involve a woman?”
“Sometimes more than one woman,” he said, as though there had been dozens. “You remember.”
Evelyn said, “But—no children.”
“No, no children,” he said. “Not with anybody.”
“Oh,” she said. “But maybe—”
“Not with anybody. I’m taking that nap,” he said. He leaned against the window and angled his hat over his eyes. That’s who he was: the boy who had always cared about hats and angles, sharp-nosed and elbowed. He had thought he was the hero of the family. He never was, not even one day.
Evelyn felt in her head for the names of her children again. She thought there might be blanks. Of course Sidney, of course Etta. And Fannie. Some she had not seen in a long time. She could remember them as babies and she could remember them as college graduates. When the children were infants she loved them entirely, because they loved her back, or maybe because they didn’t: love didn’t enter into it, it was all hunger and smell. Only when they got older would they try to start fights with you.
Days might go by when she looked at her children and thought, with some pleasure, I don’t love you. It wasn’t an emotion—she didn’t hate them, or dislike them—but an absence, like not having a headache after weeks of lights being too bright and noises too loud. Lovelessness was a kind of freedom. Those days she was indulgent, baked and played and told stories, because she didn’t care, she was a conman, a fraud, and good at it. Those were the days her children told back to her: do you remember when we went to the Zoo and got thrown out? Thrown out from the zoo? Do you remember when we made men out of bread with our silverware and toothpicks?
Were those breadmen real? She was falling asleep. Her eyes were closed though she could feel the humming earth beneath her. The car wasn’t moving, the tires were. She listened for the fly who’d been in the car since the Pennsylvania border, felt sorry for it and hoped it would get to New York, make losing its fly family and the known world not so bad. It, like her, was an immigrant. No buzz. She could feel a jolt but she decided she was asleep. The car jostled. Stopped. She opened her eyes to a sign, neon and animated.
“Howard Johnson’s,” she read aloud.
“I could use a cup of coffee,” the young woman said woefully. Then, “Phil. Phillip. Wake up. Let’s have dinner.”
He pushed the hat to the back of his head. You could see his brain was still half-swamped by sleep. “What’s going on?” he said.
“Dinner,” said his wife, and left the car.
The outside of the restaurant was orange and turquoise blue. The inside was brown and orange. “Let’s go to the ladies’ room,” she said to Evelyn, and Evelyn shook her head. “It’s been hours. Don’t you think? Come with me,” she said, with an unhappy look on her face. “I don’t want to be by myself.”
“Get a table and I’ll meet you,” Phillip said.
Indignity, thought Evelyn, though she followed the young woman to the back of the restaurant to the toilets, obeyed her. Outside the ladies’ room was a vending machine that sold aspirin, black rubber combs, ballpoint pens, notepads. A notepad and a pen: she could use them. The comb, too. She wanted everything but she knew there was no money in her purse.
It was a relief to sit down in the booth, a relief to look at someone head on instead of the back of her neck. Her son was elsewhere. The waitresses walked through the dining room in their orange uniforms with pots of coffee, filling cups as though it were some ancient, sacred task: fire to mankind; knowledge to mankind; absolution to weary mothers. There was a big sign over a separate counter.
“Ice cream,” read Evelyn.
“Have ice cream,” the young wife said. “Have a banana split.”
Evelyn laughed. “For dinner?”
“I think you should have anything you want,” said the young woman sadly. “My god!”
The waitress came and the young woman ordered for all of them, even absent Phillip: a grilled cheese sandwich and a cup of black coffee, a clam plate and a root beer float, and a banana split.
“What sort of ice cream?”
“Oh!” said Evelyn. She closed her eyes and saw nothing, then looked to the counter which had each flavor listed neatly beneath the sign that said ICE CREAM. “Frozen pudding,” she read, not a decision, but then the waitress wrote it down and took the words away. May I see, thought Evelyn, so that I might say it aloud. She couldn’t ask; she was incapable of asking.
The young woman was pretty enough, just, though she wore a tangerine lipstick that didn’t suit her. Still sad. There was something furtive about her. Then she seized her head in her hands as though suddenly remembering something.
“My god,” she said again. “Evelyn. I almost killed you.”
“Oh,” said Evelyn. She tried to say, You must have had a good reason but instead said, “Good.”
That made the young woman smile unhappily. She added, “And Phillip. I mean, all of us.” The coffee came, and she picked up the sugar pourer, decided against it, stirred her black coffee in its cup anyhow. “Not that I would have counted. I fell asleep, while I was driving. You were asleep and Phil was asleep and then for a second I was. Two seconds. I woke up when the wheel hit the shoulder, and the only reason I knew I’d been asleep is because I woke up. Neither of you opened your eyes a crack. Can you imagine? If I’d killed us. How would the Adlers have taken it? Your children,” she said. “All those children. If an interloper had killed their mother and the favored son. They would have—” Like Evelyn she seemed to know what she felt but couldn’t find the language. “They would have sued,” she said. “Even if I was dead. That, I believe, is how the Adlers grieve. Jesus Christ!” She seized her head again. “I can’t believe it.”
The young woman leaned back so that the arriving waitress could set down the food, then moved her plate away so she could prop her chin on her hand. She gave Evelyn a sorrowful look. “I’m only telling you because I think you won’t remember. Oh!” she said, because then Phillip was there, patting her on the shoulder and pointing, slide over, caressing her elbow.
Not favored. He smelled of cigarette smoke: that’s where he’d been. It came across the table at Evelyn. He’d been like that as a boy, thought he could do what he liked and nobody would notice, and if you did notice he would lie. All around them in the Howard Johnson’s dining room people smoked over their ice cream sundaes. Only he believed that smoking was so interesting it should be a secret.
The young woman looked at him worriedly, with a little edge of lust that Evelyn noticed, as she had always noticed lust, from her childhood to her marriage to the house brimming with want. Some people had excellent hearing or eyesight; Evelyn could divine physical desire and which way it was pointed. Why Joseph and Etta had never married. Why this one had married three times. Look at the pair of them, thought Evelyn, two big bodied people insisting on sitting next to each other, when she was a little thing, plenty of room on her side of the booth. But that wouldn’t do. The ice cream had bits of fruit in it. She couldn’t remember what she’d ordered, but between the cold and the whipped cream and the sweet stodgy banana, her whole head was filled with sensation, which was like a thought, a sentence, a kind of monologue. She wished she could say it aloud.
“What are you girls talking about?” Phillip asked.
“We were talking about all you kids,” the young woman said to Phillip.
“Oh, yeah?” He pulled his plate closer to him. “These for me?”
She nodded. “I don’t see how you can stomach them. Belly’s the best part.”
“I like clam strips. ‘All you kids.’ The youngest of us is 25 now.”
“You’re a fearsome lot,” said the young woman.
“We’re not so bad. What do you think, Ma?” Her children never called her Ma either. “We awful?”
“Loud,” said Evelyn. But also lovely. She herself had only one sister and one brother. Nobody in her family understood her: her single brother and her single sister each had two children. To have twelve! It was unnecessary; it made them think unnecessarily of her innards. Where the organs went. How all those children got out.
“We were all pretty well-behaved,” said Phillip. “Except Goldie.”
That was a lie. She didn’t think Phillip should have a family, not with this young woman, who seemed to Evelyn a shade of orange to match the roof of the Howard Johnson’s. That was what lust did for you. Changed your color. Evelyn was all for it. There was a hotel behind the restaurant, there always was, they should stop for the night but even then the young people would sleep in one double bed and the old lady—she herself—in the other. She pulled a napkin from the dispenser, found a pencil in her purse. She tried to write on the napkin, lightly so as not to tear it, but it didn’t work. Ah: placemat. What a miracle writing was: think of a word and watch your hand make it. She wrote the sentence. One of the things about being a mother, how unfair it was, other people’s memories. She’d slapped Etta once--once. She’d gotten rid of a stray cat who lived under the porch a single week. But that’s what she heard about. They hadn’t liked getting kicked out of the zoo after all.
You don’t know what people remember.
Those were the words. She tore her sentence from the placemat and handed it to the young woman.
The young woman said nothing as she read. Put her hand over her mouth. She was pretty enough when you couldn’t see the lipstick. There was a plastic tray on the table with a few coins left on it, some words written on it at the bottom. Evelyn knocked the coins aside and then poured them off. “Thank you,” she read. She put the tray in her purse.
“Mother!” Phillip said. “That’s not for taking. It belongs here.”
Did he think she was an idiot? She took the tray out and showed him. “It says thank you,” she said.
Then he, like his pretty wife, was aghast. He rubbed his face. At last he said, as sincerely as she’d ever heard him say anything, “It just makes me so sad.”
“What does, darling?” Evelyn tucked the tray in her purse again and reached across the table to take his hand. “Phillip. Phillip, sweetheart, tell me.”
She read it aloud because it felt like a thought though she knew it wasn’t; she could read whole sentences as clearly as she ever did. She could write them, too. Sometimes at home she would write a thought down so she could read it aloud. But here she was in the middle of the back seat, jouncing. No writing while jouncing. She couldn’t spell words in her head which meant she couldn’t read words in her head which meant talking was complicated. She’d had a stroke, she was getting better, she was better than she could make clear.
“Chucken Coop,” she said, knowing that wasn’t right.
“Are you hungry?” her son’s wife asked.
Evelyn hadn’t left Indianapolis in years. The children had kept her home. Now she was old and the children were gone. In the front seat, the wife—though Evelyn wasn’t sure she was a wife; there was something unsettled between the two of them up there—the young woman held an atlas, light blue and in loose geographic order, with a failing binding. If it came apart they would never be able to piece the country together. Pennsylvania took four pages. They had been in it a long time.
“In another hour we can stop for the night,” said her son.
“Phil, maybe your mother—”
“Let’s press on,” he said. Phillip. That’s who he was. Placid, she told herself, green. She pictured the drowsy head of a tree passing over her drowsy head. Tree, tree, tree. Then realized that was what was happening on the other side of the car, the outside. Trees along the road like a colonnade. That word, colonnade, in her head though she knew she could not move it to her mouth and say it. She tried. “Oh, look at the children,” she said.
“What children?” her son said, irritated.
“Yes,” said her son’s wife. “Aren’t they darling.”
The words in her head lived at many levels, like a cutaway illustration of the ocean and all who occupied it. Remote and close up. Quicksilver and pokey. Irretrievable and plentiful. Sometimes they came together in a sentence that she could net and say aloud, but mostly not. Why she liked signs. She could read anything.
Her son’s wife looked into the atlas. “What did the last sign say?”
Evelyn tried to remember, thought, Bird.
“Indian Lake,” her son said. “We should be in New York tomorrow morning. I won’t make it tonight.”
“I could drive,” said his wife.
“You could.”
“At any moment.”
“I know.”
“I could,” said Evelyn, and her son laughed. He was not, she remembered, one of the nice ones. She had eleven children. They were all alive, she wanted to say, but she wasn’t sure. They had all survived childhood. If any were dead, and they might be, it wasn’t her fault.
“Sure,” he said. “But maybe—I think your license has expired.”
“Did you ever drive, Evelyn?” the young woman asked.
“She never did.”
“Really?” said Evelyn. Then, offended, “I’m sure you’re right.” Then, “How long?”
“How long what, Mother.”
“This kidnapping.”
That got the young woman’s attention. She turned around, her hands on the car seat like Kilroy. “Oh, no. Not a kidnapping.”
“Feels like.”
“No,” said the young woman, who had beveled little features Evelyn didn’t trust, nose, lips. “Phil—”
But he shook out his wrists, right one, left, and said nothing.
She was in the middle of the backseat riding through green, more green, darker green now.
“It’s night,” she said.
“Nearly.”
“Where—I forgot.” Then, because she meant it: “Where?”
“We’re taking you to Goldie’s, Mother. She’s got a big apartment. Elevator building. Miriam and Chick and Joseph all live in the city. We’re close by. Good doctors, too.”
“I don’t need a doctor.”
Her son laughed again.
Cars came at them from the other direction. Headlights on now. In the fog, with the rolling hills, the cars looked like they flew down from the sky and landed on the road. Thrilled her every time.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“To Goldie’s.”
“Why Goldie?”
“She can afford it.”
The young woman said, “Phil. You can afford it.”
“Can I?” he said.
“Afford what?” asked Evelyn.
He said, “Goldie misses you. The whole New York crew does. She’s hired a nurse.”
“I don’t need a nurse.”
“If we’re that close,” said the woman, “I can drive. Get us a little nearer, anyhow.”
“You don’t like to drive in the dark.”
“I don’t mind it. It’s not that dark.”
“Getting. Ok. All right. Maybe you drive for half an hour? I’ll nap. We can get a little closer, at least.”
“All right,” she said. “Deal.”
The car bumped, angled off, came to a stop. They were still for the first time in hours. All of Evelyn’s body rattled. “What are we doing?” she asked.
“Changing drivers.”
“For a new one?”
“Constance and I are swapping.”
“That’s nice.” She slid over and opened the door.
“What are you doing, Mother?”
“Getting—”
“We’ll stop a little later,” he said.
For a moment she was alone in the car by the trees, and she thought, I’ll run for it. She could hear them talking outside. The keys were still in the car. She had driven, just not in his memory. The young woman got behind the wheel, and then her son sat on the passenger’s side and pulled the door closed.
“OK, Mother?” he said.
She said, “Why do you call me Mother?”
There was a pause. He said, wounded, “Because you’re my mother.”
“Well for heavens’ sake I know that,” she said.
“All right.”
“I do know it.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“My children call me Mama,” she said. “Aren’t you one of my children?”
“Yes,” he said. “Sure.” Then, in an obnoxious tone she remembered from his childhood, “Which one?”
“Phillip,” she said. She didn’t know she was going to say it before she did.
“That’s right!” said the young woman, turning the car back on.
“Etta, Chick, Shelley, Rita, Phillip, Miriam, Joseph, Sidney, Fannie, Goldie.”
“Ha!” said the young woman. Then: “Was that everyone?”
“I think so,” he said.
“Ha,” said Evelyn. “I don’t remember which one she is.”
“She’s not—”
“Wife,” said Evelyn.
True enough he was the scandal of his family. After a moment, he said, “Third. The best one. Constance.”
“Divorced,” said Evelyn.
“Goldie’s divorced,” said Phillip. “That’s worse.”
“Why worse?”
“Because she’s a girl. She’s a woman.”
His wife said, “Didn’t your divorces involve a woman?”
“Sometimes more than one woman,” he said, as though there had been dozens. “You remember.”
Evelyn said, “But—no children.”
“No, no children,” he said. “Not with anybody.”
“Oh,” she said. “But maybe—”
“Not with anybody. I’m taking that nap,” he said. He leaned against the window and angled his hat over his eyes. That’s who he was: the boy who had always cared about hats and angles, sharp-nosed and elbowed. He had thought he was the hero of the family. He never was, not even one day.
Evelyn felt in her head for the names of her children again. She thought there might be blanks. Of course Sidney, of course Etta. And Fannie. Some she had not seen in a long time. She could remember them as babies and she could remember them as college graduates. When the children were infants she loved them entirely, because they loved her back, or maybe because they didn’t: love didn’t enter into it, it was all hunger and smell. Only when they got older would they try to start fights with you.
Days might go by when she looked at her children and thought, with some pleasure, I don’t love you. It wasn’t an emotion—she didn’t hate them, or dislike them—but an absence, like not having a headache after weeks of lights being too bright and noises too loud. Lovelessness was a kind of freedom. Those days she was indulgent, baked and played and told stories, because she didn’t care, she was a conman, a fraud, and good at it. Those were the days her children told back to her: do you remember when we went to the Zoo and got thrown out? Thrown out from the zoo? Do you remember when we made men out of bread with our silverware and toothpicks?
Were those breadmen real? She was falling asleep. Her eyes were closed though she could feel the humming earth beneath her. The car wasn’t moving, the tires were. She listened for the fly who’d been in the car since the Pennsylvania border, felt sorry for it and hoped it would get to New York, make losing its fly family and the known world not so bad. It, like her, was an immigrant. No buzz. She could feel a jolt but she decided she was asleep. The car jostled. Stopped. She opened her eyes to a sign, neon and animated.
“Howard Johnson’s,” she read aloud.
“I could use a cup of coffee,” the young woman said woefully. Then, “Phil. Phillip. Wake up. Let’s have dinner.”
He pushed the hat to the back of his head. You could see his brain was still half-swamped by sleep. “What’s going on?” he said.
“Dinner,” said his wife, and left the car.
The outside of the restaurant was orange and turquoise blue. The inside was brown and orange. “Let’s go to the ladies’ room,” she said to Evelyn, and Evelyn shook her head. “It’s been hours. Don’t you think? Come with me,” she said, with an unhappy look on her face. “I don’t want to be by myself.”
“Get a table and I’ll meet you,” Phillip said.
Indignity, thought Evelyn, though she followed the young woman to the back of the restaurant to the toilets, obeyed her. Outside the ladies’ room was a vending machine that sold aspirin, black rubber combs, ballpoint pens, notepads. A notepad and a pen: she could use them. The comb, too. She wanted everything but she knew there was no money in her purse.
It was a relief to sit down in the booth, a relief to look at someone head on instead of the back of her neck. Her son was elsewhere. The waitresses walked through the dining room in their orange uniforms with pots of coffee, filling cups as though it were some ancient, sacred task: fire to mankind; knowledge to mankind; absolution to weary mothers. There was a big sign over a separate counter.
“Ice cream,” read Evelyn.
“Have ice cream,” the young wife said. “Have a banana split.”
Evelyn laughed. “For dinner?”
“I think you should have anything you want,” said the young woman sadly. “My god!”
The waitress came and the young woman ordered for all of them, even absent Phillip: a grilled cheese sandwich and a cup of black coffee, a clam plate and a root beer float, and a banana split.
“What sort of ice cream?”
“Oh!” said Evelyn. She closed her eyes and saw nothing, then looked to the counter which had each flavor listed neatly beneath the sign that said ICE CREAM. “Frozen pudding,” she read, not a decision, but then the waitress wrote it down and took the words away. May I see, thought Evelyn, so that I might say it aloud. She couldn’t ask; she was incapable of asking.
The young woman was pretty enough, just, though she wore a tangerine lipstick that didn’t suit her. Still sad. There was something furtive about her. Then she seized her head in her hands as though suddenly remembering something.
“My god,” she said again. “Evelyn. I almost killed you.”
“Oh,” said Evelyn. She tried to say, You must have had a good reason but instead said, “Good.”
That made the young woman smile unhappily. She added, “And Phillip. I mean, all of us.” The coffee came, and she picked up the sugar pourer, decided against it, stirred her black coffee in its cup anyhow. “Not that I would have counted. I fell asleep, while I was driving. You were asleep and Phil was asleep and then for a second I was. Two seconds. I woke up when the wheel hit the shoulder, and the only reason I knew I’d been asleep is because I woke up. Neither of you opened your eyes a crack. Can you imagine? If I’d killed us. How would the Adlers have taken it? Your children,” she said. “All those children. If an interloper had killed their mother and the favored son. They would have—” Like Evelyn she seemed to know what she felt but couldn’t find the language. “They would have sued,” she said. “Even if I was dead. That, I believe, is how the Adlers grieve. Jesus Christ!” She seized her head again. “I can’t believe it.”
The young woman leaned back so that the arriving waitress could set down the food, then moved her plate away so she could prop her chin on her hand. She gave Evelyn a sorrowful look. “I’m only telling you because I think you won’t remember. Oh!” she said, because then Phillip was there, patting her on the shoulder and pointing, slide over, caressing her elbow.
Not favored. He smelled of cigarette smoke: that’s where he’d been. It came across the table at Evelyn. He’d been like that as a boy, thought he could do what he liked and nobody would notice, and if you did notice he would lie. All around them in the Howard Johnson’s dining room people smoked over their ice cream sundaes. Only he believed that smoking was so interesting it should be a secret.
The young woman looked at him worriedly, with a little edge of lust that Evelyn noticed, as she had always noticed lust, from her childhood to her marriage to the house brimming with want. Some people had excellent hearing or eyesight; Evelyn could divine physical desire and which way it was pointed. Why Joseph and Etta had never married. Why this one had married three times. Look at the pair of them, thought Evelyn, two big bodied people insisting on sitting next to each other, when she was a little thing, plenty of room on her side of the booth. But that wouldn’t do. The ice cream had bits of fruit in it. She couldn’t remember what she’d ordered, but between the cold and the whipped cream and the sweet stodgy banana, her whole head was filled with sensation, which was like a thought, a sentence, a kind of monologue. She wished she could say it aloud.
“What are you girls talking about?” Phillip asked.
“We were talking about all you kids,” the young woman said to Phillip.
“Oh, yeah?” He pulled his plate closer to him. “These for me?”
She nodded. “I don’t see how you can stomach them. Belly’s the best part.”
“I like clam strips. ‘All you kids.’ The youngest of us is 25 now.”
“You’re a fearsome lot,” said the young woman.
“We’re not so bad. What do you think, Ma?” Her children never called her Ma either. “We awful?”
“Loud,” said Evelyn. But also lovely. She herself had only one sister and one brother. Nobody in her family understood her: her single brother and her single sister each had two children. To have twelve! It was unnecessary; it made them think unnecessarily of her innards. Where the organs went. How all those children got out.
“We were all pretty well-behaved,” said Phillip. “Except Goldie.”
That was a lie. She didn’t think Phillip should have a family, not with this young woman, who seemed to Evelyn a shade of orange to match the roof of the Howard Johnson’s. That was what lust did for you. Changed your color. Evelyn was all for it. There was a hotel behind the restaurant, there always was, they should stop for the night but even then the young people would sleep in one double bed and the old lady—she herself—in the other. She pulled a napkin from the dispenser, found a pencil in her purse. She tried to write on the napkin, lightly so as not to tear it, but it didn’t work. Ah: placemat. What a miracle writing was: think of a word and watch your hand make it. She wrote the sentence. One of the things about being a mother, how unfair it was, other people’s memories. She’d slapped Etta once--once. She’d gotten rid of a stray cat who lived under the porch a single week. But that’s what she heard about. They hadn’t liked getting kicked out of the zoo after all.
You don’t know what people remember.
Those were the words. She tore her sentence from the placemat and handed it to the young woman.
The young woman said nothing as she read. Put her hand over her mouth. She was pretty enough when you couldn’t see the lipstick. There was a plastic tray on the table with a few coins left on it, some words written on it at the bottom. Evelyn knocked the coins aside and then poured them off. “Thank you,” she read. She put the tray in her purse.
“Mother!” Phillip said. “That’s not for taking. It belongs here.”
Did he think she was an idiot? She took the tray out and showed him. “It says thank you,” she said.
Then he, like his pretty wife, was aghast. He rubbed his face. At last he said, as sincerely as she’d ever heard him say anything, “It just makes me so sad.”
“What does, darling?” Evelyn tucked the tray in her purse again and reached across the table to take his hand. “Phillip. Phillip, sweetheart, tell me.”