The Golden State

“Is there a museum or visitor center or something we can go to?” I ask and Alice says “No” and she sounds irritable and I say “Sounds good” and think about what I am going to do, then, because now that we are away from Altavista I know with great certainty that we can’t go back, we can’t go back to the mobile home, we can’t go back to the High Winds Market. We have to go Elsewhere. Alice doesn’t make a peep and Honey doesn’t make a peep and I’m thinking why did I sign on to chauffer this person around who I don’t even know, etc. But I’m bored and I’ve had so little conversation in the last week, the last eight months, that I decide to make some.

“Can you tell me about this camp thing? I don’t know about it.” She turns from gazing out the window and faces ahead. “During World War Two they let conscientious objectors do public works instead of putting them in jail or making them take office jobs in the army. But they gave ’em awful jobs, working in mental institutions and doing heavy labor, like where we’re going. He liked it, though, the harder the better.”

“Was this the thing where they sent Depression guys to plant trees?” and she raises her eyebrows at me. “No, that was before, but they used the same camps. The ‘Depression guys.’ Huh. What do they teach young people? It was three million people,” she says. “It’s why you have all these nice parks and the country didn’t just blow away with the dust storms.” She frowns. “It was segregated, though. So my husband disapproved. But the CO camps weren’t.”

“You said you came out here to see him?” and out of the corner of my eye I see her nod. “When I got out of the service,” she says. “We had been writing letters. I met him in school. Quaker college. I joined up halfway through school, after he left, but I was only in for a year. I came and visited him and then I went back to school. We waited for each other.”

I don’t know whether she means sex or just generally waiting. “How long were you apart.” “A couple years, all told,” she says. “And now fifty years.” I look over at her.

We are taking the shorter route rather than the truly scenic one that would have wound around the big mountain and covered more California ground than Oregon. We pass farmland, pine forests, little tiny towns: population 54, 240, 300, 76. It’s good to have that feeling again of the endless west rather than the circumscribed plain of Altavista and the unrelieved sagebrush and juniper scrub. We are beginning to leave the monotony of the high desert and there are green hills like dells I think they are called, and the trees are different and when I press the switch to roll down the window I can feel the influence of the sea in the air just the slightest bit. This feels like Humboldt land, Del Norte land, the trees are taller, the air is wetter. Honey blats in the back and I crane my neck and catch her eye in the rearview and say “Hullo baby” and she kicks and grins at me and pants and doesn’t look the slightest bit ruffled. The sky, which has been foreboding since our picnic yesterday, is dark and ponderous to the west.

“Looks a little unpleasant toward the camp, weather-wise,” I say.

“I brought my umbrella,” Alice says looking ahead.

We haven’t been driving for very long when she starts speaking extempore.

“I keep thinking about that trip to Turkey, the one you made me remember.” I glance over at her and make a sound for her to go on.

“We took a train all the way to the east part of the country, Diyarbakır it was called.” Diyarbakır where Ellery died, my mnemonic device until the end of time. “It was such a boring train ride—very long unbroken expanses of countryside.” She laughs. “I remember that’s what he said to me, ‘My goodness, this is a rather unbroken expanse of countryside,’ and then he flashed me a little look and suggested we pass the time by kissing and I said all right so we set about kissing, and it made a tremendous scandal. There was a lot of tsking from the ladies around us.” She laughs and her voice is rusty in her throat. “I was always such a prim young woman, I can’t believe now that I did it.” I’m honestly stunned by this story. “I’m amazed someone didn’t attack you. In 1960!” It’s hard to picture this woman behaving like a drunk Brit on a beach package tour, rolling around in the sand while the aunties and uncles cluck their tongues with scorn.

She looks out the window again. “I remember when I first met him I thought he was nice looking. Someone introduced us at a potluck and I remember the feeling of waiting to be introduced, as though we were in a play. I liked the shape of his hands.” She smiles again.

And now she is quiet and I wait to see if she will start again but she doesn’t. Her eyes are open. “The girl who died,” I say. “She was in Diyarbakır. I’ve never been there. I keep trying to picture what it was like.”

“You should be thankful that you don’t have that in your mind’s eye.”

“It seems like the least I can do, to sort of witness, I guess.”