I was coming home from my dear friend Mae’s wedding in DC. Such a cosmopolitan affair, her husband wore a kilt, she wore a celadon colored silk gown that made her look like a member of the Chinese royal court during the Ming Dynasty. She looked regal and gorgeous and perhaps unlike a female member of the royal court back then: radiantly happy.
I was trying to get back home to the little house in the woods where I’ve been staying all summer, and which I’ll be leaving, not without regret, day after tomorrow. I landed in the little Islip Airport, and caught a quick cab to the bus stop somewhere on the Long Island Expressway. The bus, a.k.a. the Hampton Jitney, stood me up. I wasn’t surprised—everything had gone so seamlessly well getting to DC and so far, getting back. Nut jobs were blowing up street corners in Chelsea, and the airport security was pretty tight and made me hand over my conditioner and tweezers. Still the plane left on time. And, forty minutes out of Baltimore we were at MacArthur, one of those small town airports that seem so charming to me, since I’m always going between the two behemoths—LAX and JFK.
What do you do for fun on the expressway with two hours to kill and one convenience store and gas station, waiting for the bus? I hadn’t seen TV all summer since there isn’t one here, so I watched The Donald in a baseball cap and his chubby cheeked face telling the cameras what the Saturday night explosion means to us as a country. I watched Hillary do the same. She was infinitely more sane. And while I’m on the subject of Hillary, why do so many women dislike this very accomplished fellow female so much? Women, what’s wrong with us? Her marriage to Bill is not my business, or your business or anybody else’s business. What our business should be is to elect a sane president—enough said.
I bought some nuts at the convenience store, and I looked for something like a big chief tablet and a bic pen. I finally got the guy behind the counter to give me some printer paper, and luckily I did have a pen in my purse. I thought about what this said about us as a country, the convenience store had five aisles full of junk food items: chips, cookies, soda, red bulls, candy, and a full aisle labeled “Children’s Candy.” There were five feet of painkillers, antacids, condoms; even some discreet sex toys, but not a one big chief tablet or pad of paper, or a paltry pen. Yes, I was lost in Long Island, but I was also lost in America.
I thought of Rabbit Angstrom, Updike’s ex-football player and ultimately rich owner of his Toyota dealership; the lyrical descriptions of the chips, the cookies, the candies that he wrote. Updike was talking about an America who has swelled and swelled so much more since he wrote Rabbit at Rest, the last of the books when Angstrom blows up like the frog in the fable, dead of lechery, gluttony and sloth.
I also thought of Nabokov, riding across the country chasing butterflies with Mrs. Nabokov, staying at the muttering retreats of one night cheap hotels, his tongue was traveling across the palette and Lolita was being born right here in America.
I thought too of Albert Brooks and Julie Haggerty getting Lost In America, and the police stopping Brooks and asking him to “step outside the home!” And even though I didn’t want to, I thought about my own childhood in Shreveport, and how lonely and out of it I always felt. But back then, there were tablets of paper. And those had saved me.
By now I was one and a half hours into the experience. Luckily I had a little charge left on my phone. I called the Hampton Jitney a couple of more times.
Pretty soon the bus pulled up, I sat down, drank one of the tiny waters they give out, fell sound asleep and dreamed my parents were still alive. There he was, Big Daddy and even in the dream I knew he couldn’t get me anymore. As usual, he was swigging off his coke bottle, he was smoking a cigarette and there were the dingy patches under his eyes. Mama was young and she was wearing a lace cocktail dress and smoking too. They seemed far, far away, even in my dream.
When I woke up with a start, there were the great big heavy shade trees in front of the Hunting Inn on Main Street, and I wasn’t lost anymore.
Gentle readers: I rejoiced!
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