woods of Vermont are prone to be, my poor sister arrived after an eight-hour drive with unwashed hair and nothing to sand down the edges.
I made Michele wash his hair and shave twice, consecutively, before we left. I couldn’t possibly ask this man who sometimes showers twice a day, and who hand-blends his own cologne every morning before knotting his silk tie, to go a whole weekend without showering, but at least I got him into the mindset of a five-minute shower. My mother’s frugality can be so acute that it takes on an actual hostility, and I was trying urgently to protect Michele from catching the sharpest edge of it.
Between constant nursing and trying to run the restaurant with a baby attached to my boob, I had managed only a small case of Asian cooking ingredients for my mother’s pantry. Which he also packed securely into the back of the wagon. Michele drove and I sat in the back with Marco.
We inched up through New York and Connecticut, practically wordless. This was not uncommon for us, but I’d always hated it. I really like to talk. I thought those wordlessly shared sandwiches on wintery beaches were just the appropriately remote closeness of two people catching a quick deceit at three in the morning, but I’d since caught on that that was as much as we could find with each other. We were still living apart in our separate homes as we always had, discovering, harshly, all of the ways in which a new child can really stress out an already fragile relationship, even though we had enthusiastically intended the pregnancy. But I think he felt complimented that I would introduce him to my mother. I think he saw it as a privilege. I, of course, for twenty years, had been more or less successfully sparing those I loved from the experience. But Michele, following his own internal logic, viewed it, I believe, as an honor. How close we must be getting, he and I, if he alone made it to the inner sanctum: my mother.
No sooner had we crossed out of the state of Massachusetts than I started to feel a certain lack of enthusiasm. I was not gladdened by the Vermont Welcomes You sign. Even though we were only minutes over the Massachusetts border, still hours from her house, still surrounded by fellow travelers, people like us who enjoy other human contact and human activity and who don’t need to be secluded on a hundred acres without even a house pet, we were nonetheless in the state of Vermont where she lives, and I started to feel like I was standing too close to someone phlegmy and contagious. After only an hour in Vermont, the last of the daylight disappeared and a crushing darkness fell, by four-thirty, nearly denting the metal panels of the safest car in the world, it felt, and buckling the hood and roof, and threatening to seep in around the closed windows. Marco slept, nursed, then slept again. And I envied him.
Driving in this pure pitch, with nothing to talk about with Michele and nothing but the back of his head and the surrounding blackness to see, it’s possible that I’ve never since known such isolation, save for maybe that one time when I couldn’t bring myself to get out of my car. Even a vaguely picturesque barn in the far far distance, with one light at the top of the phone pole to light up the yard and the tractors, where I could have imagined a taciturn family having dinner after a long and healthy day of outdoor work, only served to emphasize how much pasture, darkness, and solitude there was between them and there and us and here. I listened, apprehensively, to the thinning radio station, wondering how many more miles before we would lose the signal entirely. When another car traveling south, across the unnecessarily wide median, approached in the distance, my spirit lifted and I never took my eyes off it as it came over the top of the hill into sight and its headlights intersected with ours, but then it passed behind us—and my reticence re-descended, now in the distinct shape of dread.
We were left alone, abandoned by the southbound car, us speeding north, to emptiness. Black emptiness. The southbound car that had just passed us would soon enough be encountering lights, city limits, people, art, commerce, poetry, citizens living actual, messy fantastic delicious Life. But we drove on