We have arrived at our final state. After many hushed, tense miles, the sight of the Colorado River and WELCOME TO CALIFORNIA sign make me feel better, despite the fact that I am hellishly tired. We both are, I think. The time changes and crazy hours have caught up to us. The blazing heat doesn’t help, not to mention the fact that the AC doesn’t work at all anymore. And of course, we still have to travel with the windows partially open at all times because of the exhaust. Still, I haven’t suffered all that much discomfort. My trusty little blue pills have seen to that. Ella the crazed dope addict strikes again.

“We’re going to stay in a hotel tonight,” I tell John, trying to sound assertive, though I’m still afraid of him after the episode at the Snow Cap.

“Sure. Good idea,” he says, nice as you please.

We roll into the dreary outskirts of Needles. I will try not to be fussy about a motel, but I know I’ll be miserable if we end up in a fleabag.

“John, there’s a place over there. It says ‘Vacancy.’ Pull in.”

Without a word, John pulls in. I open the door of the van and a big blast of hot desert air hits me and almost knocks me on my fanny, I swear.

John gets my You-Go and wheels it around. I plop my purse in the basket and we head on up to the lobby. As soon as I walk in, I smell something I don’t like. I don’t know if it’s food or body odor or what, but I don’t like it.

“Can I help you?” says the young woman at the desk.

“No, thank you,” I say, turning around. John opens the door for me.

We go into three other hotels like this. I figure if a hotel can’t even keep its lobby clean, how are the rooms going to be? It’s almost 7:00 P.M. by the time we settle on the Best Western and I’m about ready to keel over. There is no one to help us with our bags, so I have to put mine on the You-Go, which makes it harder to push. Luckily, there’s a handicap space right in front of the hotel by the lobby.

When I get into the room, there’s a delivery menu from a restaurant down the street. I order us roast beef sandwiches and milk shakes, then take my meds and a little blue pill and flop into bed. By the time the food arrives, I feel much better. John turns on the TV while we eat. It isn’t long before I fall asleep.

 

I dream of our old bungalow in Detroit. It’s nice being there again. Everything is the same. I recognize our old Danish Modern dining room set from Hudson’s, our old couch, I recognize the daisy pattern wallpaper that John hung in the kitchen. I can see the basement that John paneled and that I furnished with early American furniture from Arlens. I don’t even remember looking at these things in the dream, but I know they are there.

In the dream, I’m sitting in Cindy’s old room after she moved out to get married. We never really did anything with the room, but there was enough space for a television and a couple of old chairs. It’s late at night and John is asleep upstairs. I’m with Kevin, who’s about thirteen, and we’re watching Johnny Carson. We were both night owls and we watched The Tonight Show every night. I missed having Cindy around the house so it was nice spending time with my son, even though he probably shouldn’t have been staying up so late. But we both loved the comedians—Buddy Hackett, Bob Newhart, Shecky Greene, Alan King, Charlie Callas.

In the dream, we are watching Johnny do his Carnac the Magnificent routine where he dresses like a swami and holds an envelope to his forehead and divines the answers to the questions inside the envelope. Kevin and I are laughing at something Johnny says to Ed about a diseased yak in his sleeping bag.

It’s a wonderful quiet little dream. Me just watching TV with my son in a room filled with old furniture. We’re eating cheese crackers and laughing. The only odd part is the answer to one of Carnac’s questions.

“Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and the Ayatollah Khomeini,” Johnny says, holding the envelope to his turban.

Ed looks at Johnny and repeats, “Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and the Ayatollah Khomeini.”

Carnac stares daggers at Ed, then he rips open the envelope and reads, “Who you’ll meet at the Disneyland in hell.”

 

I have no idea what time it is when the phone rings. I’m not even sure where it is that I’m sleeping. I try to look at the clock, but I don’t have my glasses on. The phone rings and rings, just like at home because the kids know it takes us a long time to get to it. Finally, I manage to pick it up.

“Hello?”

“Mrs. Robina? This is Eric, the night clerk at the front desk. Um, your husband is down here and he, uh, seems a little confused.”

“Is he all right?”

“He’s fine. It’s just that he’s upset. First he went outside and stood by your van for a little while, came in, went back out there, then he came in asking me where his keys were. That’s when I looked up what room he was in.”

I take a breath, rub the sand from my left eye. At least he’s okay.

“Now he keeps asking me where the coffee is. I told him that we don’t have coffee until 6:30 A.M., but he insists we have it somewhere. He’s getting perturbed.”

“I’m terribly sorry,” I say. “I’ll be down there as soon as I can.”

Thank God I remembered to take the keys away from him last night.

 

“Where were you?” says John, in the elevator back to our room.

I’m weaving over my You-Go, still woozy from being awakened so abruptly. “I was upstairs sleeping, John.”

“I want to get going.”

I lead us off the elevator to our room. “It’s too early. Let’s try to get a little more sleep, all right?”

“Let’s get going.”

“John, it’s 4:30 in the morning. It’s too early. We’re going to get all screwed up.”

I get John settled in with the TV and a little bag of potato chips from the snack basket. There’s an old episode of Cheers on, which keeps him happy. I lie with him on the bed with my head propped up on the big mound of pillows we have constructed from every pillow in the joint. Needless to say, I can’t sleep anymore. It’s too soon for another pill. I consider a drink, but it’s too close to morning.

The Cheers music comes on with the credits. John wipes his greasy fingers on his shirt. “Okay,” he says. “Let’s hit the road.”

“John, it’s too early. It’s five in the morning.”

“Aren’t we getting an early start?”

“No, we’re going to get some sleep. We paid a lot for this hotel room and I’d like to get some use out of it.”

Two minutes later from John: “Okay, let’s get going.”

“Oh, the hell with it,” I say. “Fine, let’s get going.”

 

Before we leave, I take a sponge bath in the bathroom, using all the towels and washcloths, cleaning everywhere I’ve been meaning to clean for the past week. God knows, I hope I haven’t been one of those old ladies that goes around with her old lady smell. My aunt Cora was like that. People’s eyes were watering after she left a room. I told myself I’d never be that way.

By the time we leave, the hotel room is an absolute shambles. I’ve never left a room like that in my life. I’ve always practically made the bed before I left, but not this time. For one thing, I’m not strong enough this morning. Besides, for what we paid for this room, they can jolly well clean up after us.

 

After we gas up the Leisure Seeker, we do indeed hit the road. The early start turns out to be a good idea since we’re heading west out of Needles right through the Mojave on the original alignment of 66. Early is the best time to head through the desert.

We are the only people on the road when the sun begins to rise. I sit in my captain’s chair in the Leisure Seeker, a Styrofoam cup of tepid gas station coffee in my hand as I watch the colors lift the night sky—violet evaporating to cherry pink, charcoal vanishing to chalky blue. The stars fade as outlines of spiky aloe and twined brush and jutting silver Sacramento Mountains emerge upon the horizon as if an Ansel Adams photograph were being developed before my eyes.

Maybe it’s because we’re close to the end of our trip that I’m getting sentimental, but I feel as though I was supposed to see this today. And John, in his madness, allowed it to happen.

I reach over and touch his arm. “Thank you.”

John looks at me, worried.

 

It isn’t long before the Mojave wears out its welcome. Once the sun starts its brutal ascent, the landscape changes. Desolation enters through the eyes and soon invades the vitals. I stare out at naked mountains and empty dun-colored landscape. There is brush everywhere, leached of color, large lifeless clouds of it pluming the stamped-down earth. We keep passing a certain type of cactus with long spiny branches that twist up from the ground like arthritic fingers trying to hold on to something. I remember from The Grapes of Wrath when Tom Joad called this desert the bones of the country. I agree, but those bones feel more like mine today, brittle and unforgiving.

Around Chambless, I fumble two discomfort pills into my mouth, wash them down with cold bitter coffee. I find a half of another in my pocket and I take that, too. I just want to get us to Santa Monica, the end of the road. We’ve got less than two hundred and fifty miles now and hopefully John will be all right for five more hours.

After a while, the scenery starts to float. The sky has brush growing from it, but it doesn’t obscure the sun any, which is high and hard now, blistering no mercy. I close my eyes, trying to shake off the dizziness. When I look into the sky again, this time I see an image of a glowing woman. I don’t recognize her at first, but then it occurs to me that it’s Our Lady of Guadalupe. Except that it doesn’t exactly look like her. She’s got a golden glow encircling her, like Our Lady, and a bright green shawl emblazoned with stars, but underneath it she’s wearing a beige pantsuit, one that looks kind of familiar. She’s also put on quite a bit of weight. In fact, Our Lady looks a lot like me, but younger. She smiles serenely at me, waves, then holds a finger over her mouth as if she has a secret to keep.

Still dizzy, I gulp the rest of the coffee that I’ve been holding in my hand for the past hour, hoping the caffeine will help keep me conscious. My hand smells acrid and smoky. I look at the cup and see grooves in the Styrofoam from my fingernails from where I’ve been clutching it. I look back up into the sky, but there’s nothing but glare. I drop the cup on the floor of the van.

 

By the time we get to Ludlow, I feel better. I decide that it would just be best to forget what happened back there. I feel sleepy, so I crank down the window all the way. The wind noise increases and billows of warm air rush into the car, soothing at first, but seconds later it feels like I’m tumbling around in a clothes dryer, my head full of lint and bits of old laundered Kleenex. I roll the window back up leaving a crack of an inch and a half.

“What’s wrong with the road?” John asks me. The heat rising from the pavement keeps tricking him into tapping on the brakes.

“John, it’s nothing,” I say, scared by the cars veering around us, the occupants yelling silently behind sealed windows.

Two minutes later, he asks me the same thing. Then again and again.

At Barstow, we stop for gas and at a McDonald’s so John can eat. I suck on a small Coke to quell my nausea and clear my head. John finishes his two hamburgers, burps, and starts the van again as if he’s been programmed to do so. We head back onto 66, but not really. The old road is buried beneath us, paved over by I-15. It’s sad to think that they couldn’t have just left it alone, but progress, that obstinate SOB, is adamant about such things.

The trees are different now. They are gnarled and knobby, corkscrewed into the earth, dark spines growing at the ends of hairy, welted branches that prick the air like giant bottlebrushes. They remind me of pictures of mutated cells that I’ve seen on TV. My book says they are Joshua trees, and since I’ve traveled this way before, you’d think I’d recognize them, but I don’t.

 

Soon 66 rises to the surface again, but I decide that it’s time for a shortcut. We stay on I-15, which takes us through the Cajon Pass, while bypassing San Bernardino, which I’ve heard is no great shakes.

Unfortunately, the drive downhill through the pass is very steep and wide and crowded. Six lanes of traffic, all going downhill too fast. Maybe San Berdoo wouldn’t have been so bad after all. It’s not long before gravity takes over and the Leisure Seeker starts going faster and faster down the precipitous incline.

“John,” I say, watching the speedometer climb to 70 mph. “We’re going kind of fast.”

John ignores me.

Soon, we’re doing seventy-five, then eighty. We haven’t gone eighty at any point during this entire trip. The Leisure Seeker starts to vibrate.

“John,” I say. “Please, John. Slow down.”

What does John do? He gets in the left lane. We start flashing past cars on my side, each one whipping by like a gasp of unfinished breath. The vibration makes my head wobble. I clench my teeth, for fear of chipping my dentures. I’m getting really scared now. I see a sign up ahead:

RUNAWAY TRUCK RAMP

“John! Goddamn it!”

John says nothing. Eighty-five. Then something happens. I stop being afraid. A calmness settles over me. I take a breath. My stomach feels better. The knot in my neck loosens and the discomfort eases. The draft at the window rises to a scream. Ninety mph. The undercarriage chatters like a tommy gun.

I close my eyes.

Then I hear a loud thunk. I feel the van slow down about 10 mph. I open my eyes and see John’s hand on the transmission lever, as he slides it into L 2. Another, even louder thunk and a jolt as the van slows down even more. The vibration eases up as the engine of the Leisure Seeker howls, a spirit longing to be set free. I hear objects shift in the back as the speedometer slips down to sixty. John stares at the road straight ahead, grunts. He puts on his turn signal, moves over into the right lane. Someone honks at us.

I turn my head and look at the trees.

 

Quite suddenly, we are back on the old road. I am so happy to be off the freeway and out of the desert. I’m surprised at how nice Rancho Cucamonga is. (I think of the old Jack Benny routine—“Anaheim, Azusa, and Cuc-a-monga!”) Here, Route 66 is called Foothill Boulevard and has been magically transformed into one long lush green strip of fancy shopping centers, restaurants, and office buildings. I have to say, it’s good to see places that are thriving for a change. As we enter the town of Claremont, there is a sign:

LOS ANGELES COUNTY LIMITS

I am relieved, amazed, elated, and a little saddened to see this sign. It means we’re about fifty miles from the ocean. I realize now that we need a plan. Everything I read about Los Angeles tells me that there will be nothing but traffic everywhere. I’m not sure afternoon is the time to venture into all that. I decide that we need a place to stay tonight. I direct John toward a filling station.

“Let’s stop for gas, John. I need a pit stop.”

I decide to let John take care of the van, while I grab the keys and wheel myself into the gas station. The bathroom is the usual indescribable mess. After I get myself put back together, I head up to the counter. There’s a middle-aged gal there, with frizzy brown hair, reading a copy of US Weekly. She’s wearing a blue denim shirt with a Shell insignia on it.

“How are you today?” I ask.

“Oh, fair to partly cloudy,” she says, giving me a smile.

I try not to stare at the spaces in her mouth where there should be teeth. “Would you happen to know of any good campgrounds around here?”

She scrunches up her face while she thinks. That’s when I notice that Norma is also missing her eyebrows. There are just thin curved blue lines drawn where they should be. I wonder if she colors them to match her outfit.

“A few miles up Foothill you’ll see a sign for a mobile home park. Turn there and it’s just a little ways. It’s a nice little place.”

“Well, thank you so much.”

“No problem, dear. You take care.” Norma smiles again, wider now, unafraid to reveal what is no longer there.

 

Norma was right. The Foothill Boulevard Mobile Home Park is a lovely, clean little place, surrounded by trees, not too close to the strip malls. On the front door of the manager’s office is a carved wooden sign that reads:

GOD BLESS OUR TRAILER HOME

Soon as we drive up, someone comes right to the window of the Leisure Seeker with a clipboard and sets us up for the night, just like that. As we idle through the park to our campsite, I get the feeling that these people have been living here for a long time. A couple of the trailers are painted cute colors like turquoise and dusty rose. Some have pocket gardens or flagpoles near the front door. One even has a little fountain with running water. It’s a neighborhood. In short, I feel like we’re home. At least as close as we’re going to be.

“This is nice,” says John.

It doesn’t take us long to get things set up. After I have John pull out the canopy and put out the chairs in front, he disappears inside the van, closes the door behind him. I’ve hidden my purse, so there’s nothing much he can get into there. I decide not to worry.

I should mention that I have formulated our plan. We’re going to stay here for a while. Of course, we’ll go to Santa Monica tomorrow just to actually make it to the end of the road. That’s important to me. We’ll get up early to beat the traffic and conquer that last fifty miles. I want to see the ocean one more time. And by God, we’re still heading to Disneyland.

I’m dozing in our sturdiest lawn chair in front of the van, when John opens the door, walks up next to me. I hear a familiar sound, a bubbly soft pffft.

“Hey, mister,” I say, turning halfway. “Where did you find that beer?”

He stops, looks at the can in his hand and squints. “In the fridge.”

“Would you get me one?”

“I’ll split this with you.”

“All right.” I notice a triangle of foam on John’s neck. I grab his arm and pull him down to where I can reach him. I wipe the foam off with my fingers. “What have you been up to? Did you shave?”

He feels his cheek. “Yep.” He bends down over me and gives me a kiss, half on the cheek, half on the lips. It’s as far as either of us can reach. I can smell Edge shaving gel and Old Spice aftershave.

“You smell good for a change, old man.” I take another look at him. He’s actually changed clothes, too. “What got into you? You’re all duded up.”

“Nothing,” he says, like the senility has been a ruse, a really good practical joke he’s been playing on me for the past four years.

“Well, I approve.” I don’t know what brought this on, but every once in a while he gets a bug up his ass and actually does the things he’s supposed to do.

John sits on the chair next to me. He hands me his can of Milwaukee’s Best and I take a sip. It’s so cold that it makes my eyes water. It must have been in the back of the fridge. I look over at him, clean shaven for the first time in days, no Sasquatch beard, wearing a decent plaid shirt and a pair of kelly green double knits that, if not clean, at least haven’t been worn for the past four days straight. He looks like my husband again.

What’s going on with this place? John’s cleaned up, and I feel physically better than I have for the past two weeks. I don’t know if it’s because we’re so close to our destination or what, but I feel healthy. I know it’s an illusion, but for now, I’m enjoying it.

 

There isn’t much left in the fridge so I decide that we have to go out for food. I don’t know if I want to stop at a supermarket or a restaurant, but I’m actually feeling well enough to have a good meal and I want to take advantage of that. So we pack everything up again so we can drive. We leave our chairs and a few things sitting at our site.

There’s nothing promising nearby. John wants to go to McDonald’s, but I nix it. Before we get too far, I just tell him to pull into a supermarket. We park in the handicapped space and luckily there’s a shopping cart that someone left right nearby. I latch on to it and we head on in.

Ralph’s Supermarket is big and bright and confusing. After roaming around, we finally find the beverage aisle. While John gets Pepsi, I lug a big jug of Carlo Rossi Dago Red into the cart and a six-pack of Hamm’s. John might like another beer, I figure. After we pick up Cheez-Its and Wheat Thins, I feel myself getting exhausted, so I wheel us to the butcher counter and pick up a couple of nice-looking steaks, Italian bread, and twice-baked potatoes from the hot deli. On the way to the checkout, I find a few staples. Then we hightail it out of there before I keel over.

“I’m pooped,” I say, once we get everything into the van, ourselves included. “Let’s go home.” Odd thing to say, considering that we’re driving it.

I’ll be damned, but as soon as we get back to the trailer park, I start to feel better again. I still feel like I could eat. So we cook up the steaks on the fry pan, warm the potatoes and bread, and pour ourselves a glass of wine. It’s a wonderful dinner. For once, I eat almost everything on my plate. I feel full and content.

Afterward, we decide to watch slides. We do it simpler and safer this time. I have John set up the projector (which amazingly still works) on a card table by the door. I tape the sheet on the side of the van and we project up close. The images are about two feet by two feet. It’s like watching television, except the show is your life.

 

Since we didn’t go this time, we watch slides from a previous trip to the Grand Canyon, a long time ago. The first one is of me standing at the edge of the canyon. It’s sunset, what John used to call “magic time.” The whole canyon glows with a rich vermilion light. John was far away when he took this shot and since I’m dressed in orange you can really barely see me, but I know I’m there in the corner of the picture, ragged layers of stone blushing beneath me, a fiery silhouette dwarfed by that great yawn of the earth.

I remember perfectly the outfit that I’m wearing in the picture. It was really cute—slacks and a floral patterned blouse, both in a burnt sienna. Even John commented on it after he took the photo, how much I matched the interior of the canyon. “I’m one with nature,” I remember saying. John laughed, but the kids didn’t get it.

There’s a whole series of canyon sunset shots. I push the button a little quicker with each one and create my own twilight. The colors grow deeper and darker—crimson gold burns into blood red—the canyon engorged. After five or six slides, I decide that the sun is taking too damn long to set. I click forward until we get to a daytime shot. The canyon looks entirely different.

With the bright morning sun bending over the craggy rim of the pit, you can see all the different colors now, the rainbow qualities of the stone, the play of shadow upon shadow, the illusion of bottomlessness that is not bottomlessness at all, but simply the Colorado River, doing its job, carving through eons of hard stone. I can see only a hint of the actual river in this shot and it makes me think that if this river can slice this deep into the earth over thousands of years, what’s to stop it from just plain cutting the world in half? Could that happen?

I think about all that unstoppable water. My entire life would account for about one-sixty-fourth of an inch of this canyon. That’s probably a generous estimate, I realize, but I find solace in this imaginary fact. Funny how sense of my complete and utter unimportance soothes me these days.

“That’s a beautiful shot, John.”

John yawns and says, “I’m going to go to bed.”

I don’t want to go in yet. It’s a lovely night and I’m happy to be here with John. I hold out my glass for him to fill. “Just one more, John.”

We watch one more half tray of slides, a trip we took to the Pacific Northwest. There are shots of us in a sweet little town called Victoria, just outside Vancouver in British Columbia. I loved that town. It was so clean and quaint and innocent. It doesn’t look at all like where I grew up in Detroit on Tillman Street, but it looks like how the world looked then. Not so dangerous, so burdened, so sad.

The final slide is a nice one of John and I standing in front of a castle in Victoria, taken by our friends Dorothy and Al.

“That’s the last one,” I say, and before I can say anything else, John gets up and lifts the projector from the table.

“John,” I yell. “For God’s sake, let me turn it off.”

He pays no attention to me. I follow the image of us as it zigzags like a flashlight beam, projected on the trailer next door, then across the road, then on the trees, then finally into the sky, where it is released completely, a mist of light.

“Put it down, John!” I say.

Sheepishly, John looks at me, then sets the projector back on the table.

 

My alarm goes off at 4:30. In the dim oven light above our kitchenette, I wrestle myself to my feet and find my way to the bathroom. Before I go in, I put on water for instant coffee for John and me, though I’m actually fairly awake. These days, I tend to wake with a start, heart clamoring at my breastbone. Even still, I take a breath and almost manage a smile. The cloudy mind and sandy eyes gladden me this morning for it truly feels like old times being up this early in the Leisure Seeker.

After the bathroom, I open the door to the van and peek outside. It still looks like night out there, but the darkness has a sepia quality that tells me it won’t be long before first light. John coughs raggedly, then opens his eyes. He’s still in his clothes from last night.

“John, get up,” I say. “We’ve got to get going.”

He coughs again. “Why?”

“Because we don’t want to hit all the traffic going into Los Angeles, that’s why.”

He grunts and I think for a minute that he’s going to give me a hard time, but he gets up. My husband has spent his life trying to avoid things like waiting in lines and being stuck in traffic. This is right up his alley.

By now the kettle is boiling. I mix up a mug of coffee and hand it to him.

At 5:15, John is in the driver’s seat and I’m right next to him. As we leave the Foothill Boulevard Trailer Park, I tell myself that we will, with any luck, be back this evening. I hope we can get our same space.

 

San Dimas, Glendora, Azusa, Irwindale, Monrovia—all small, well-kept towns, one right after another. Foothill Boulevard keeps changing names and I have to keep looking in my guidebooks to make sure we’re going in the right direction. One interesting thing that we do see is a hotel in Monrovia that, according to one of my books, has got a design that’s part art deco and part Aztec and Mayan. I can honestly say I’ve never seen another building like it and I’m not sure I want to.

Just before Pasadena, the road changes to Colorado Boulevard and I’ll be damned if traffic doesn’t start picking up the moment we get into town, even this early in the day. Pasadena looks pretty in this low light, but I’m too busy fretting about what’s ahead to enjoy the scenery. I try to relax and look around at the palm trees and the stores and the lovely old buildings. John is doing fine. He’s not saying much but he’s driving like a champ.

My guidebook leads us onto Arroyo Parkway, then the Pasadena Freeway, where we get off at Figueroa Street. We head west on Sunset Boulevard.

We are in the city of Los Angeles.

 

Despite what I said earlier about the dangers awaiting old people in big cities, I have to admit, I’m thrilled to be on Sunset Boulevard. Having heard of this street all my life, it’s fun to be finally seeing it. Traffic’s getting worse and there are lots of parts that look slummy, but this street feels exciting to me. I guess we’re getting more courageous as this trip goes on. That or more stupid. Either way, we’re here.

The sun is gleaming high and bright now. It’s going to be a lovely day, I can tell. I see a pretty young woman in a very short skirt and halter-top, standing in front of a discount store, staring at the van.

“John,” I say, “was that a hooker?”

Then I see another woman, this one older and tired looking, leaning against the window of an abandoned restaurant. I feel sorry for these women, about their choices, about what they have to do just to live. The woman looks at us as we pass. I raise my hand. She looks the other way.

We’re supposed to shift onto Santa Monica Boulevard, but Sunset is so interesting I don’t want to get off. My map says that Sunset intersects with Santa Monica Boulevard a few miles up, so I decide that we can stay on a bit longer.

The signs keep changing languages—Spanish, Armenian, Japanese. We pass tiny shopping centers crammed with foreign restaurants. I see Hollywood dry cleaners and Hollywood pizza joints and Hollywood wig stores. We pass TV stations and radio stations and movie theaters and guitar stores and nicer restaurants. Meanwhile, traffic keeps getting worse, but I don’t mind it because there’s so much to look at.

At the corner of Sunset and Vine, I see a sign that makes my breath catch. “John, look! It’s Schwab’s drugstore. That’s where Lana Turner was discovered.”

John turns to me. “Boy, she was built like a brick shithouse.”

“She was sitting at the counter when some Hollywood big shot saw her and decided to put her in the movies.”

“Probably wanted to get into her pants,” says John.

I laugh. “Yeah, you’re probably right.” I look for the drugstore, but don’t see it anywhere. I guess only the sign is there now. We pass an old Cinerama domed theater, then a place called Crossroads of the World.

We’re getting closer.

 

West Hollywood is very flashy. There are huge billboards up and down the street, most of them with pictures of women dressed a lot like the ones I saw walking the street. There are fancy hotels, expensive-looking restaurants, giant heroic statues of Kermit the Frog and Bullwinkle the Moose. I see nightclubs with names like “The Laugh Factory” and “The Body Shop,” but these sure don’t look like the factories or body shops we have in Detroit. I get the feeling that people in Hollywood like to make people think they’re actually doing work for a living. I see a lot of limousines that must be taking people off to do that alleged work.

By the time we turn back onto Santa Monica Boulevard, traffic is bumper to bumper, and the discomfort starts to come on strong. I crush a little blue pill between my teeth and wash it down with coffee dregs.

Frustrated, John sits back in his captain’s chair, breathes loudly through his nose. I watch him creep closer and closer to a convertible in front of us.

“Take it easy,” I say. “We’ve just got a bit more to go.” Out the window, I see a homey-looking little restaurant with green awnings called “Dan Tana’s.”

“That looks like a nice little place,” I say to John. “Like Bill Knapp’s.”

He breathes loudly again, says nothing, looks ahead at the traffic. I glance up at a billboard and see an enormous picture of two half-naked men embracing and frolicking in the surf, with these words under it:

GAY CRUISES FROM $899!

We’re in Hollywood, all right.

 

After a long boring stretch of malls, storefronts, and construction, we finally arrive in Santa Monica. It looks like a nice town, but we’re not here to see the sights. We’re here for one thing only—to get to the end of the road. As the street numbers get lower, I detect the clean salt smell of the ocean. Even mingled with the exhaust fumes, it clears my head and replaces my discomfort with a trill of excitement. Up ahead, a sign over the street reads:

OCEAN AVENUE

In front of us, there are palm trees and a park, and I can see straight through to the flickering luminous Pacific. Above it, the sky glows white and blue. It looks every bit as glorious as I thought it would.

“John. Look. There it is,” I say, pointing ahead of us.

“There what is?”

“The ocean, dummy.”

“I’ll be damned. We made it.”

I am amazed and pleased to hear that John has some understanding of what we’ve been doing. I thought he only knew that it was his job to drive. I reach over and put my hand on his arm. “Yes, we did. We made it.”

“Hot damn,” he says, scratching his head.

“You got us here, John. You did a good job, darling.”

John looks at me with the widest smile I have seen on that face in years. It makes me wonder if I have been too tough on the old boy. I guess I don’t tell him that he does a good job very often these days.

“Turn left here, John.”

Along the avenue, the shoreline park gets wider and I notice hobos milling around, doing nothing in particular. Even with their perfect suntans, they seem out of place here at the ocean, so clean and endless.

A few blocks later, we are at the Santa Monica Pier. The sign looks like it does in all my books, like it’s been the same for years, an old-fashioned arch with letters like from an old Fred Astaire movie.

SANTA MONICA
* YACHT HARBOR*
SPORT FISHING*BOATING

cafes

 

“Turn right here, John. And go slowly.”

We pass under the sign and I feel my heart flutter and lighten. I was not sure we could do this, but we did. I’m proud of us. Up ahead is a yellow-and-purple Ferris wheel, the one they used in that movie The Sting, so I’ve heard. I decide that this would be a fitting ending to today’s journey.

“Come on, John. We’re going for a ride.”

We find a place to park and John pulls out the You-Go for me. The walk is not too far. The sunshine, the ocean air, and the fact that there are people around somehow steadies my gait, straightens my back ever so slightly, sharpens my wits. Then again, maybe it’s just the dope.

Luckily, the line is short. The carny at the Ferris wheel, an unkempt man who looks like he just finished a three-day bender, says he’ll keep an eye on the You-Go while we go up. I don’t really have any choice, so I believe him.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “It won’t end up in a chop shop.” He laughs and reveals brilliant white teeth that look too perfect to be real. I can smell sweat and cheap hooch oozing from his pores. His periwinkle qiana shirt is grimy around the neck. He gives both John and me a clammy mitt to hold on to as we stumble into our little two-seat bench. I wonder if he expects us to tip him.

“Have fun now, you two,” he says, flashing those Hollywood choppers at us. “No necking.”

He pulls a safety bar down. We are locked in.

As we slowly rise into the air, the Ferris wheel makes a tat-tat-tat noise that is vaguely disturbing to me, but apparently not to John. I look over and find him asleep.

“John,” I say gently.

He tips his head back, opens his eyes wide, then closes them again and lowers his head. I let him sleep. I watch the palm trees as they lift and fall with the breeze. The water is moving just enough to make the reflection of the sun warp and ripple, creating inky ridges in the surface. We rise and rise. This height and all this open air would have terrified me not long ago, but not today. I am a daredevil today. I am Evel Knievel. I am that Intimidator fellow from the NASCAR. I look down and locate the Leisure Seeker in the parking lot.

All the sounds from the amusement park fade now. I hear only the wind and the creaking of the machinery that holds us here. I have my hair pulled into its little pygmy knot at the back, but there are loose strands whipping my face. The higher we go, the more the air pummels me, keeps me from taking a full breath. Just as I start to grow dizzy, it dies down.

I can see the back of the Santa Monica pier sign. I remember that the Pacific Ocean wasn’t actually the official end of Route 66, that the original end was somewhere else in Santa Monica on Olympic Boulevard. The Santa Monica Pier was later accepted as the unofficial ending because it made sense to people for the road to end at the Pacific Ocean. I would have to say that I agree.

I take a long deep breath of clean ocean air as our box seat on the Ferris wheel reaches the tippy-top. It’s just about then that John awakens from his nap.

He looks around and starts screaming.

 

Later, back in the van, on the freeway, on our way back to the trailer park, I can barely keep from panting from the discomfort, which is back in force. In fact, on a scale of one to ten, it’s about a fourteen.

“Are we on I-10, John?”

“Sure.”

I don’t believe him. I frantically search for an interstate sign, even though I’m almost positive we’re on the right freeway. I directed us there, after all. I think I’m frazzled from our little incident on the Ferris wheel, not to mention the wrenching discomfort.

Just before we have to slow down for yet another traffic jam, I spot a sign that says I-10 East. I would breathe a sigh of relief, but I don’t seem to be able to.

Finally I inhale. Loudly. John turns and looks at me when he should be watching the traffic.

“What’s wrong?” he says. “You got a stomachache?”

“Yes, I’m going to take some Tums.” I open my purse and fish out two of my little blue pills. I should have taken two before, but I wanted to be at least fairly clearheaded when we finally reached our destination. I try to wash it down with a swig of flat Pepsi from a bottle I find under the seat, but the pills stick in my throat. Everything almost comes gushing up. I take another swig and somehow manage to get them down.

“That wasn’t a Tums,” says John.

“It’s better than a Tum. Watch the road.”

Great. Now he’s paying attention.

 

It is only when I wake up that I realize that I’ve been sleeping at all. I’m feeling more comfortable now. I lift my head slightly to look over at John who is staring at the road in his very own trance. Traffic is backed up and we’re going about 25 mph. I wonder how long I’ve been conked out, how far we’ve gone.

“Where are we?” I say, still groggy.

John says nothing. I look at a sign on the side of the freeway and realize that we are no longer on I-10 at all. We are on I-5, just approaching an exit for a town called Buena Park.

“How did we get on this road?”

“You said to get on it.”

“I did not, John. I was asleep. Don’t lie to me.”

“Aw, shit.” I don’t know if he’s swearing at the traffic up ahead or at me.

“Damn it, John.” I choke down another sip of Pepsi and look at my map. When I locate I-5, I see that maybe he hasn’t screwed up so badly. We are about to approach the exit for Anaheim. And though I had my heart set on staying back at the good trailer park, I see that this probably makes more sense. We were headed here, anyway.

“Get off at the next exit, John,” I say, smiling at what I’m going to say next. “We’re going to Disneyland.”

 

Of course, we’re not going to Disneyland today. I’ll settle for finding us someplace to stay for the night. Which turns out to be surprisingly easy. Disneyland is located not far from the freeway and there are billboards everywhere for motels, campgrounds, you name it. I choose one and we get off the freeway, as simple as that.

The Best Destination RV Park is only about three miles or so from Disneyland, but it’s away from most of the congestion. Los Angeles was bad enough, but this area is everyone trying to get to one place. Us included.

As we check in (no curbside service here—I almost fall on my doped-up hind end getting out of the van), the woman in charge mentions that they do have shuttle service to Disneyland. That’s for us.

After we find our space, I make sure John drives in so the back of our van is facing the back of our neighbor’s RV. Then I sit at the picnic table and give him directions as he sets up camp.

This place is not as nice as the good trailer park in Claremont, but it’s not bad. The only problem is that everywhere you look in this campground, there are kids running around like wild Indians. (I guess it’s wild Native Americans these days.) This takes some getting used to.

After my inspection, I happen to look up to see that we are directly in the shadow of a giant two-lobed water tower with a deep roundish base, completely covered with polka dots. It is ugly beyond all my powers of description. Yet another closer look reveals the secret: its silhouette looks suspiciously like a certain cartoon mouse.

After John finishes, I get my You-Go and take a lap around the van to make sure everything’s in order.

“Good job, John,” I say.

“I want a beer,” he says.

It’s 3:20 in the afternoon. Late enough. “Okay, you’ve earned it.”

John just stands there.

“Go get it,” I say. “You’re not crippled.”

“Where do you keep it?”

“It’s in the fridge. Where it always is.”

John disappears into the van.

“Get me one, too,” I yell after him. I think for a moment and realize that I’ve been saying “You’re not crippled” all my life. My mother used to say it to me. Now we’re at the point where we actually are crippled.

But I’m still not going to get John a beer.

 

It’s dark now and the campground has quieted down. Before, you could tell that there were a lot of oversugared, overstimulated kids all worked up from a big day at Disneyland. (That’s how my Kevin was when we took him. We had to dose him with Pepto-Bismol before he could sleep, poor thing.) They’ve all collapsed into bed by now, stomachs souring, churning up bad dreams of looming giant rodents.

After sandwiches (I force myself to eat to keep up my strength for tomorrow), we set up the projector next to the van for slides. Tonight’s show is Disneyland 1966. It wasn’t the last time we were there, but it was the best time. The kids were both young enough to think it was the most wonderful place on earth. And John and I were plenty young enough to go on rides and enjoy it all through our children’s eyes.

The first shot is Main Street swarming with people, the castle in the background. In the foreground, I am standing there with Kevin and Cindy, holding both of their hands, all of us smiling our biggest smiles. I notice how nicely dressed we all are.

The entrance to Tomorrowland—flagpoles and a little cart selling ice creams. On one side is a pavilion with a gigantic atom on it, but my eye is drawn to the huge red-and-white rocket ship straight ahead. That must have looked so futuristic then. Now, even to these ancient eyes, it looks ridiculous and old-fashioned. I doubt if that’s still there. Is there even still a Tomorrowland?

The next shot is of Goofy kneeling behind Kevin and Cindy and giving them both a squeeze. The kids are ecstatic, but I notice that Goofy’s oversized hand is behind Kevin’s head. Looks like he’s about to give him a good smack.

“Is that a dog?” says John.

“Yeah, it’s Goofy, John. The cartoon character.”

“That’s not Goofy,” he says.

I give him a look. “You’re goofy.”

In a later slide, the kids are riding around on little flying saucers. This must be Tomorrowland still because I see a futuristic-looking house in the background—a big mushroom with windows.

Kevin and me in Frontierland, both wearing coonskin caps. He’s adorable. I, on the other hand, don’t look so good. I’m put in mind of one of my less successful wigs.

The next shot is of John and Cindy. There aren’t that many pictures of John in our vacation slides, so I must have taken it. Cindy looks darling, but John seems to be missing his head. He must have put that in there a long time ago for comic relief. Apparently, it still works. Next to me, John is laughing like a madman.

The last slide is Main Street at night, with the castle lit silver blue in the background. In the sky, fireworks are going off, cresting, cracking open the darkness, shooting long tendrils of colored light down to the buildings, way longer than I’ve ever seen for fireworks.

“I used an extralong exposure on that one,” says John.

“You did?” I say, still surprised at what he just pulls out of his memory.

I linger on this slide. I study that blue castle and those fireworks and realize that this is the image I’ve had in my head of Disneyland for all these years. Just like the beginning of the Wonderful World of Disney TV show. Maybe that’s why I wanted to head here this time. I know it’s ridiculous, but part of me wants to think that the world after this one could look like that.

Like I said before, I stopped having notions about religion and heaven long ago—angels and harps and clouds and all that malarkey. Yet some silly, childish side of me still wants to believe in something like this. A gleaming world of energy and light, where nothing is quite the same color as it is on earth—everything bluer, greener, redder. Or maybe we just become the colors, that light spilling from the sky over the castle. Perhaps it would be somewhere we’ve already been, the place we were before we were born, so dying is simply a return. I guess if that were true, then somehow we’d remember it. Maybe that’s what I’m doing with this whole trip—looking for somewhere that I remember, deep in some crevice of my soul. Who knows? Maybe Disneyland is heaven. Isn’t that the damnedest, craziest thing you’ve ever heard? Must be the dope talking.

 

I sleep horribly this night, never actually sleeping, only dreaming. For all my remarks about the sugared-up children, I’m the one who ends up dreaming of mice. Hundreds of them, swarming me, nipping at me, pulling away pieces of me, leaving only areas where wads of stuffing and burlap are exposed on my body.

I wake again and again from my twilight sleep. That’s another expression I got from my doctors. They were forever telling me that their procedures required that I be anesthetized into a “twilight sleep,” a term so gentle and calm sounding that no one could possibly object. Yet I found that, for me, their lovely sunset slumber was always filled with terrors and nightmares.

Unfortunately, the mice are just tonight’s selected short. The feature presentation stars a particular nursing home that I know all too well, though John and I have visited many of them. This is part of your duty as an old person. You do it out of love and obligation, out of fondness for families and friends, out of lack of anything better to do. It is bleak entertainment, but it gets you ready for what’s ahead.

The nursing home I dream of is a place where our friend Jim spent his final months. His wife, Dawn, had died the year before, then his kids put him there. Jim and Dawn were our best friends, so we had to go visit. Twice a month, we’d limp through those rank-smelling hallways to see him, but Jim didn’t even recognize us. Us, John and Ella, fellow travelers, people he had camped with for the past twenty-two years. We weren’t the people he wanted to see. He wanted to see Dawn. The staff would tell us that he did nothing but roll around in his wheelchair all day and call for his wife. “Dawn,” he would say. “Dawn? Where are you?”

My dream is of the last time we visited Jim. It was always torture for John to see his friend that way, but this day it was worse than it had ever been. Jim couldn’t even talk by this time, couldn’t even call for Dawn. He sat there in his chair, drooling, chin resting on his chest. Every now and then, his lips moved as if he were speaking some silent language that only he could understand. When we tried to talk to him, he just looked up at us, reacting to the sound of our voices with an endless, unseeing stare.

After we left, John turned to me in the car and said what he always said to me after we visited Jim. “I will shoot myself before I end up like that.” But this last time, he said something else as well. He took my hand and said, “Ella, promise me, promise me that you will never put me in a place like that.”

I looked at my husband and promised him that one thing.

 

I open my eyes a little after six, finally giving up on sleep. This crushingly bright California morning, I am feeling so weak I can barely hold my head up.

John is snoring. During the night, he pulled an afghan over him and it almost covers his entire head. I check to see that he hasn’t wet himself. He hasn’t, but he’s getting ripe again.

I try to pull myself up from bed and don’t quite make it. I consider rolling out, but fear that I will roll right onto the floor. I remember that I’ve left one of my little blue pills in my sweatshirt pocket. So I plunge my hand into the folds of my clothes, sift through the balled-up Kleenexes, finally locating the pill at the bottom. After I gather as much saliva as I can in my mouth, which isn’t much, I swallow it. This will either put me back to sleep or allow me to actually get out of bed, one or the other.

 

When I wake up at 8:30, the discomfort has mellowed. John is lying next to me with his eyes open, staring at the ceiling of the van. I can’t tell if he’s lucid.

“John? You awake?”

He doesn’t say anything at first and I think for a horrible moment that he is dead and I’m alone.

“John?”

He turns and looks at me, matter-of-factly. “What?”

“I was just wondering if you were awake.”

“I’m awake.”

“Good. I don’t want to be alone.”

He puts his hand on the back of my head and strokes my head and neck. His hand feels wonderful, the way it used to feel, but different. I think it’s because my hair is thin now. He used to do this all the time when we were younger, then I started wearing the wigs and he mostly stopped, except when we were home and by ourselves.

“You’re not alone, sweetheart,” he says.

“I don’t want us to be apart, John.”

“We won’t be.”

He looks around at the inside of the van. I think maybe he’s going to ask if we’re home, but he doesn’t. Instead, he says, “This is a good old camper.”

“Yes, it is,” I say. There is a long time where we don’t say anything, but John looks at me so tenderly that it helps me to forget all the bad things. It’s a look that makes me feel that everything that’s going to happen will be just fine.

I smile at him. “Your hair is sticking out like Bozo.”

He smiles back at me, but I can see his eyes start to mist over, dissolving back into the gray. I start to talk faster, more than I can get out at once.

“Are you ready for Disneyland?” I say, more loudly than I mean to. “Remember, we’re going today. It’s going to be really fun, John.”

I scare him a little, but I’m trying to pull him back to me. I don’t want him to go away yet. I want him to understand.

“We are?” he says.

“Yes, John. This is the last leg of our vacation. It’s been fun, hasn’t it?”

He doesn’t know what to say. He just nods along, caught up in something he doesn’t really comprehend.

“It’s been real good,” he says.

I place my hands on John’s face, my fingers over his lips. His cheeks are coarse with hair, but I don’t care. I move my thumb over a bump on his lower lip.

“It’s all been real good,” I say.

“I’m glad we’re going away,” he says.

He’s confused. I think he thinks we’re heading out on vacation right now. I could correct him, but don’t.

“Me, too” is what I say to him. “Me, too.”

 

“Are you sure you’re up to visiting the park today, ma’am?” says the young man driving our shuttle van.

I want to say, No, goddamn it, I’m not at all up to it today, but I’m going anyway. But what I say is, “Oh, I’m sure we’ll manage.”

“They have motorized wheelchairs you can drive around in, might make things easier.”

“Really?” I say, curtly. “Well, I don’t like wheelchairs. I don’t think we’ll need that.”

He looks in the rearview mirror at me and my You-Go and doesn’t say a thing.

Soon as we drive up to the place I see that he’s right. Everything looks so much more spread out than twenty years ago. You know how when you visit a place from your childhood as an adult, everything looks so much smaller? Well, revisiting a place as an old person is the opposite. It all looks goddamned enormous.

Still, I am determined to do this. We have to take a tram just to get from the parking lot to the ticket office. I have a hell of a time just getting on the thing until some considerate young man gives us both a hand.

By the time we get to the ticket line, I’m already exhausted. We get the “One Day–One Park” tickets and they cost a fortune. I suppose it doesn’t really matter at this point. I put it on the charge card along with everything else.

“Do you have any of those motorized wheelchairs?” I ask, now realizing that there’s no way either of us will be able to get around this place, especially as weak as I’m feeling today.

“They might be all rented by now,” says the unrelentingly cheery young woman at the ticket booth. “You’ll need to talk to the cast member there. The wheelchair rentals are on the right, past the turnstiles.”

“Rentals? I was told they were free.”

“It’s thirty dollars for the electric ones. With a twenty-dollar deposit.”

“Je-sus Christ.” I look at John and he just shrugs. I don’t remember Disneyland being such a gyp joint.

As I stop to catch my breath, I glance upward to watch the monorail glide above us.

“Get a load of that! Gee whiz!” says John, pointing in the air, thrilled at the sight of the sleek orange-striped airtrain. The transformation is complete. He is a child again.

I watch the tail slither into the distance. It still feels to me like a vision of the future. Except now, it’s a future that I’m too tired to imagine.

When we pass the turnstiles, I head on over to the rental stand with John in tow. He’s already looking disoriented from all the activity.

“Are you here for an ECV?” the tidy young man says to me. I’m not so used to a southern accent coming from someone who looks Chinese.

“A what?” I say.

“An electronic convenience vehicle. An ECV. That’s what we call these.” He points to the two remaining scooters.

“I guess we are.” I get out my charge card.

He gives me the fifth “Aren’t you a cute decrepit old lady?” grin I’ve gotten since we arrived at Disneyland. They like to smile at you here while they stick their hand in your wallet.

“Come on, John,” I say. “We’re gonna drive around this joint.”

John brightens at the word drive. “Can we get the van in here?”

“No, we’re going to drive one of those.” I point to the little blue scooters.

The young man explains the controls on the chairs. I am leery at first, but after a quick supervised spin around the room, I’m pretty sure I can handle it. John, as usual, warms right up to anything he can drive. In no time, he’s scooting around like crazy.

“I don’t want you to go far away from me, John,” I say, stowing my purse in the front basket. “You hear me?”

No, he can’t hear me because he’s already taken off.

HERE YOU LEAVE TODAY
AND ENTER THE WORLD
OF YESTERDAY, TOMORROW
AND FANTASY

That’s what the sign says as we pass beneath a bridge into the park. It’s dim and crowded as we walk through, and it makes me glad we’re on the scooters. We are stable on these buggies and can’t get pushed over, a good feeling for a change. As we emerge on the other side, I am amazed to see that Disneyland hasn’t changed much, although it’s certainly more crowded than I remember, especially for 11:45 in the morning. I hate to think what this place is going to be like in four or five hours. We’ll be long gone by then.

There are families everywhere, flocks of strollers, two and three abreast. I see a herd of what must be three hundred kids all wearing the same navy blue T-shirts. There are children running around, screaming bloody murder. As we tool down Main Street U.S.A., I’m a little overwhelmed. An old horse-drawn streetcar passes by; behind it a flivver honks at us, a rude ow-ooh-ga. Behind me, I hear the clang of a steam locomotive, a brass band playing a Sousa march. People are yelling to the left of me. A group of seven or eight young kids come up quickly on my right side, laughing and screeching. I make sure my purse is secure in the basket. Suddenly, John has disappeared again. I look to my left, to my right, but I can’t see him anywhere. I start to get a little frantic.

I don’t know exactly what happens then, but when I finally look straight ahead, I see that I’m about to run right into a giant Winnie-the-Pooh, who has appeared out of nowhere. I panic and forget what to do to stop this thing.

“Watch out!” I yell at his furry orange back. At the very last second, he turns. I look into Winnie’s mouth and see a flash of panic in the eyes of the person in the costume. I hear him say “Oh!” just before he jumps out of the way.

I finally release my death grip on the accelerator and the scooter stops on the spot. All I had to do was let go. I yell my apology to Winnie-the-Pooh. He waves, but inside that costume, he’s probably giving me the finger.

John scoots up next to me, laughing. “You almost ran over that bear,” he manages to croak out between guffaws.

“Just about gave me a heart attack,” I say, starting to chuckle myself. I’m sure it was quite the sight.

Main Street U.S.A. is like an old town square. We scoot around for a while, looking at city hall, the movie theater, the penny arcade. We roll past a little café, half indoor and half out, where a man is playing old ragtime piano. We zip in and sit awhile. When a waitress approaches we tell her that we just want to sit a little and listen to the music. She says we have to order something, so we both get Cokes. The man at the piano plays “I Don’t Know Why” and “California, Here I Come.” It makes me wish we could have brought the kids and all the grandkids here, but considering nobody even wanted us to go on this vacation, I guess that probably wouldn’t have happened.

 

We are outside “The Enchanted Tiki Room” when it happens. One minute I was in line, listening to the birds sing “In the Tiki, Tiki, Tiki, Tiki, Tiki Room,” the next minute, I’m on the ground flanked by Disneyland paramedics and surrounded by onlookers. I have no idea what happened.

“Who are you?” I say to one of the young men, who’s just put an awful-smelling inhalant under my nose.

“How do you feel?” he says to me.

“I feel a little woozy, that’s all.” I don’t mention the screaming discomfort in my side where I must have fallen, or the fact that my entire body feels like a sack of potatoes that’s fallen off the truck and rolled seven blocks.

“We’re taking you to the hospital, ma’am,” he says to me, all muscles and confidence and conked blond hair. He must be a weight lifter. His head is connected directly to his shoulders. I look for his neck, but it’s nowhere to be found in his paramedic jumpsuit. He reminds me of Jack LaLanne, only bigger and stupider.

I have a gander at the other guy, an older black fellow on the heavy side. He says nothing. I turn back to Jack LaLanne.

“You’re not taking me to the fucking hospital,” I yell.

I hear a collective gasp around me. All these fine Disney citizens, indulging their morbid curiosity by rudely standing around watching the old cow passed out on her keister, are simply appalled by my language. I look up to see a gigantic Mickey Mouse. He ratchets his head around at the kids present, then holds his hands up over his giant mouse ears.

“We have to, ma’am. It’s Disneyland protocol.”

I pull my arm away from him. I try to sit up, but he holds me down. I don’t put up much of a fight because everything discomforts so bad.

“I don’t care what it is, I’m not going,” I say. “I’m fine. I just got a little dizzy. I’m not used to these contraptions of yours.” I don’t see John anywhere. “Where’s my husband?”

Jack LaLanne looks at me like, she’s going to be trouble. And he’s right. I’m not going to any hospital. I am done with hospitals.

“He’s over by our ambulance,” he finally says. “He seems disoriented. Does he have Alzheimer’s, ma’am?”

“He has a little dementia,” I say, one of my biggest fibs yet this trip. Saying John has a little dementia is like saying I have a little cancer.

I’m getting mad now, and I get even madder when I see someone come up with a stretcher. “I’m not getting on that goddamn thing!” I yell, not even knowing where I get the strength to scream like that. All the people around us look alarmed, but not as much as Jack and his pal.

I know once they have me on that, all is lost. They will take me to the hospital, and this trip will not have its proper close. I don’t know where I pull it out from, but as soon as the words leave my mouth, I realize that they are ones I can hold on to.

“If you put me on that, I will sue Disneyland for a million dollars.”

There’s nothing like a look of fear on the face of a heavily muscled man.

“I will do it, so help me God, you put me on that thing.” I cross my arms and try to keep from wincing. I narrow my eyes at him. “And it will be your fault.”

Jack waves off the stretcher for the moment. “Ma’am, there’s something wrong with you,” he says, voice straining. “We need to find out what it is.” I can see a hint of true concern reveal itself across his lantern jaw, but I don’t care. I will play this hand to the end.

“I know what’s wrong with me and I don’t need to go to any hospital to find out. I’m fine. Just help me up, get me back on that cart, and we will get out of Disneyland. You won’t have to bother with us ever again.”

He’s weighing his options now. He takes a breath, glances over at his partner, exchanges a look, then turns back to me. “We’ll have to have you sign a complete release, saying that you refused all medical assistance.”

“I don’t care. I’ll sign whatever you want. Just get us the hell out of here.”

“Fine,” says Jack LaLanne, brusquely. He’s disgusted.

Of course he’s disgusted. I won.

 

After the cab drops us off at the Leisure Seeker (a first if there ever was one), I take my very last two little blue pills, give John a Valium, and we both sleep for a long, long time. The discomfort nudges me every so often, so I drift in and out, dreaming of my children, of vacations we have taken together and of some that we haven’t. I dream of Kevin, the sadness always present in his eyes, the sadness to come. I dream of Cynthia, how she will be the strong one, bearing whatever happens, just like she always has. They will be fine, my dream self tells me. They know that their mother and father have always loved them, that whatever happens at the end of a life does not represent the entire life.

When I awaken, the discomfort is still there, but a bit more tolerable. The alarm clock in the van reads 8:07 P.M. The place is stuffy and sick-sweet smelling. It doesn’t take me long to realize that our little fridge has conked out.

It’s dark in the van, so I decide to put on a light. I had the presence of mind when we went to bed to bring our battery-powered lantern. As I lean over to reach for it, I almost lose consciousness again. I sit and pant for a minute or so before I can reach the lamp. I wipe my forehead. I click it on and the bulb winks, then slowly shudders as a brownish dim barely illuminates the room. The batteries are going, but it is the perfect light level for my eyes. I lie back down, still winded, but less so now. My body has taken a surprising amount of abuse this trip, more than even I thought it could take, certainly more than my doctors could have suspected.

It was all worth it. This trip, despite all that has happened, was well worth it. I’m sorry if I worried the children, but I have spent all of my adult life worrying about them, so I’m just going to call it even.

Beside me, John’s snoring is like the sound of ragged sheets being ripped. After every third or fourth snore, there is a long period where his breath seems to suspend itself. It is after one of these that he snorts so loudly that he wakes himself. John rouses and searches my face with his eyes. I don’t think he quite recognizes me at the moment.

“Is this home?” he asks, his voice grainy with sleep.

I nod my head.

I check and see that he must have wet himself a little, but it does not upset me, not tonight. I decide that while I still have the strength, I will clean him up, change his underwear. Every mother’s car accident rule. I unbuckle John’s pants and attempt to yank them out from under him. For once, he cooperates and lifts his bottom. I pull his pants down, shorts and all, but even with him cooperating, they don’t come off easily. I soon find out why. John has an erection like I haven’t seen on him in many years.

“Well, look at you!” I say. “You old dog.”

I’m still not sure he recognizes me, but he smiles at me, a smile I recognize.

I pull off his shoes, strip the pants off him, breathing through my mouth, trying not to look at his underpants for it would surely ruin what I’m feeling right now. I hide it all in a storage area near the foot of our bed. I take out his wallet and toss it onto the table. I turn off the lantern.

There is a catch in John’s breath as I touch my hand to his penis, and I realize that I had forgotten that sound he makes. It makes me smile and pulls me away from this ancient faltering body of mine. I look at his eyes, dreamy half closed, but locked into mine. I wonder if this could possibly work, I think to myself.

Why not? I think. Why not?

The twinge of desire I felt days before when John touched me as he helped me into the trailer, I feel it again, only more so. I feel it through the pain, through the bruises on my body, through my shrugging flesh, my vast life scribbled upon it. I feel it through my nausea, through my will to die.

“Ella,” John says to me as I continue to stroke him, the skin dryer now, his eyes clearer. “Ella.”

I can’t think of anything I would have wanted to hear more right now than my name. My husband looks at me, pulls himself up, moves toward me, over me.

This is something the body does not forget.

 

When the pain awakens me again, it is 1:17 A.M. John is sleeping so hard from the other Valium I gave him, he is not even snoring. The rhythm of his breath seems almost random at this moment. The exhalations, when they come, are long and shallow, a shhhhh, as if he is lulling us to a place of quiet. There is something so sweetly familiar to all this, after a lifetime of making love to this man, that it almost stops me from getting up to do what I have to do.

I get up anyway.

The moon is high and full, and the interior of the Leisure Seeker is lit with an opalescent mist that highlights only the edges of things. As I stand, I grab the table to steady myself. I move carefully toward our little cardboard chest of drawers, my legs stiff, but not shaky. Surprising, considering the exercise they got tonight. From the chest, I gather a favorite terry-cloth nightgown for myself and a pair of clean underwear for John. I pull the gown over my head, settle the spongy, loose fabric over my hips and legs.

I just decide to leave John in his T-shirt, dingy as it is. I tug the underwear on over his legs, but don’t quite get them over his bottom. As if cooperating unconsciously, he turns on his side toward me and I’m able to scoot them up far enough for decency’s sake. I pull the covers over John to keep him warm, then I kiss his salty forehead, and say good night to my darling husband.

For the moment, I gently rest my pillow over his left ear. He does not rouse from his sleep. I locate my purse and pluck the keys from a side pocket. I turn on the lantern, but it’s even dimmer now, barely enough to guide me.

I open the side door of the van. Outside, the Best Destination RV Park is absolutely quiet. The night air is cool against my legs, against the dampness between them. I look up. Above, there are no stars, only clouds moving faster than I think I’ve ever seen them move, long silvery forms skating across blue-black sky, voided only by the colossal silhouette of the Mickey Mouse water tower. There is an acrid hint of marigold in the air.

Quietly, I click shut the door, close all the windows, and make my way to the driver’s seat. I squeeze my eyes closed as I turn on the ignition of the Leisure Seeker. The initial growl of the engine is the part that I fear will wake John, but it doesn’t. Before long, the idle steadies to a muted rumble. Hazy tendrils of exhaust enter the van.

I get up from the driver’s seat and carefully maneuver myself back into the living area of the van, where the lantern is now glowing brown, a kind of antilight. I’m comfortable in this dimness. I am not sleepy yet, but I already feel more like John, unable to discern dream from reality.

While I still can, I shuffle through my purse for my ID, then place it on the table. I do the same with John’s driver’s license, then I get up from the bench, and go lie down next to him.

I am ready for bed.

Before long, I start to get drowsy. I feel as I do after a long night of sleeplessness—that moment when one is conscious, actually conscious, of being tugged into slumber. You sense yourself entering the realm of sleep, watch yourself lie down there, settle comfortably into nothingness. The crevice of light narrows as the bedroom door is closed.

What’s different is that usually that moment of awareness is what awakens you again, pulls you back into consciousness, but not this time. I know now that we have found that place between dark and light, between waking and sleeping.

Our travels end here and, simply put, it’s a relief. At this point, I do have to say that I am sorry for what this might do to the children, how it might look, but I’ve explained it all in a letter that will be opened after all this. Lawyers, it seems, are actually good for something. Arrangements have been made, affairs put in order. Hell, maybe we’ll even get out of paying what I’m sure will be an outrageous Visa bill.

I know this all seems horrible and shocking and lurid, but I have to tell you, it really isn’t. Long ago, John and I made up our own rules, crafted from the most mundane of things: mortgages, jobs, children, quarrels, ailments, routine, time, fear, pain, love, home. We built a life together and will happily do what comes after together. I say if love is what bonds us during our lives, why can’t it still somehow bond us, keep us together after our deaths?

End on a high point, I say. This has been a great vacation. I really had a good time. Had we stayed home, it would have all gotten worse a lot sooner, believe you me. I would have suffered much, much more. I’d have been subjected to all the indignities that modern medicine has to offer and nothing would have changed. Eventually, I would be sent home to die. Then after, despite his wishes, John would be put into a nursing home. For him, there would be a final decline of a year or two or three, each worse than the other.

But then, that’s the sad ending. One of us without the other. It’s what would happen if I didn’t end the story this way. It may be hard to believe, but this, right here? This is the happy ending, friend. What we all want, but never get.

This is not always what love means, but this is what it means for us today.

It is not your place to say.