Washington and British Columbia — our country. We were driving east across the United States, taking the most northerly route, and would cross into Canada again at Sarnia, Ontario. I don’t know if we chose this route because the Trans-Canada Highway was not completely finished at the time or if we just wanted the feeling of driving through a foreign, a very slightly foreign, country — that extra bit of interest and adventure.
We were both in high spirits. Andrew congratulated the car several times. He said he felt so much better driving it than our old car, a 1951 Austin that slowed down dismally on the hills and had a fussy-old-lady image. So Andrew said now.
“What kind of image does this one have?” said Cynthia. She listened to us carefully and liked to try out new words such as
“Lively,” I said. “Slightly sporty. It’s not show-off.”
“It’s sensible, but it has class,” Andrew said. “Like my image.”
Cynthia thought that over and said with a cautious pride, “That means like you think you want to be, Daddy?”
As for me, I was happy because of the shedding. I loved taking off. In my own house, I seemed to be often looking for a place to hide — sometimes from the children but more often from the jobs to be done and the phone ringing and the sociability of the neighborhood. I wanted to hide so that I could get busy at my real work, which was a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself. I lived in a state of siege, always losing just what I wanted to hold on to. But on trips there was no difficulty. I could be talking to Andrew, talking to the children and looking at whatever they wanted me to look at — a pig on a sign, a pony in a field, a Volkswagen on a revolving stand — and pouring lemonade into plastic cups, and all the time those bits and pieces would be flying together inside me. The essential composition would be achieved. This made me hopeful and lighthearted. It was being a watcher that did it. A watcher, not a keeper.
We turned east at Everett and climbed into the Cascades. I showed Cynthia our route on the map. First I showed her the map of the whole United States, which showed also the bottom part of Canada. Then I turned to the separate maps of each of the states we were going to pass through. Washington, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin. I showed her the dotted line across Lake Michigan, which was the route of the ferry we would take. Then we would drive across Michigan to the bridge that linked the United States and Canada at Sarnia, Ontario. Home.
Meg wanted to see too.
“You won’t understand,” said Cynthia. But she took the road atlas into the back seat.
“Sit back,” she said to Meg. “Sit still. I’ll show you.”
I could hear her tracing the route for Meg, very accurately, just as I had done it for her. She looked up all the states’ maps, knowing how to find them in alphabetical order.
“You know what that line is?” she said. “It’s the road. That line is the road we’re driving on. We’re going right along this line.”
Meg did not say anything.
“Mother, show me where we are right this minute,” said Cynthia.
I took the atlas and pointed out the road through the mountains, and she took it back and showed it to Meg. “See where the road is all wiggly?” she said. “It’s wiggly because there are so many turns in it. The wiggles are the turns.” She flipped some pages and waited a moment. “Now,” she said, “show me where we are.” Then she called to me, “Mother, she understands! She pointed to it! Meg understands maps!”
It seems to me now that we invented characters for our children. We had them firmly set to play their parts. Cynthia was bright and diligent, sensitive, courteous, watchful. Sometimes we teased her for being too conscientious, too eager to be what we in fact depended on her to be. Any reproach or failure, any rebuff, went terribly deep with her. She was fair-haired, fair-skinned, easily showing the effects of the sun, raw winds, pride, or humiliation. Meg was more solidly built, more reticent — not rebellious but stubborn sometimes, mysterious. Her silences seemed to us to show her strength of character, and her negatives were taken as signs of an imperturbable independence. Her hair was brown, and we cut it in straight bangs. Her eyes were a light hazel, clear and dazzling.
We were entirely pleased with these characters, enjoying their contradictions as well as the confirmations of them. We disliked the heavy, the uninventive, approach to being parents. I had a dread of turning into a certain kind of mother — the kind whose body sagged, who moved in a woolly-smelling, milky-smelling fog, solemn with trivial burdens. I believed that all the attention these mothers paid, their need to be burdened, was the cause of colic, bed-wetting, asthma. I favored another approach — the mock desperation, the inflated irony of the professional mothers who wrote for magazines. In those magazine pieces, the children were splendidly self-willed, hard-edged, perverse, indomitable. So were the mothers, through their wit, indomitable. The real-life mothers I warmed to were the sort who would phone up and say, “Is my embryo Hitler by any chance over at your house?” They cackled clear above the milky fog.
We saw a dead deer strapped across the front of a pickup truck.
“Somebody shot it,” Cynthia said. “Hunters shot the deer.”
“It’s not hunting season yet,” Andrew said. “They may have hit it on the road. See the sign for deer crossing?”
“I would cry if we hit one,” Cynthia said sternly.
I had made peanut-butter-and-marmalade sandwiches for the children and salmon-and-mayonnaise for us. But I had not put any lettuce in, and Andrew was disappointed.
“I didn’t have any,” I said.
“Couldn’t you have got some?”
“I’d have had to buy a whole head of lettuce just to get enough for sandwiches, and I decided it wasn’t worth it.”
This was a lie. I had forgotten.
“They’re a lot better with lettuce.”
“I didn’t think it made that much difference.” After a silence, I said, “Don’t be mad.”
“I’m not mad. I like lettuce on sandwiches.”
“I just didn’t think it mattered that much.”
“How would it be if I didn’t bother to fill up the gas tank?”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“Sing a song,” said Cynthia. She started to sing:
Andrew squeezed my hand and said, “Let’s not fight.”
“You’re right. I should have got lettuce.”
“It doesn’t matter that much.”
I wished that I could get my feelings about Andrew to come together into a serviceable and dependable feeling. I had even tried writing two lists, one of things I liked about him, one of things I disliked — in the cauldron of intimate life, things I loved and things I hated — as if I hoped by this to prove something, to come to a conclusion one way or the other. But I gave it up when I saw that all it proved was what I already knew — that I had violent contradictions. Sometimes the very sound of his footsteps seemed to me tyrannical, the set of his mouth smug and mean, his hard, straight body a barrier interposed — quite consciously, even dutifully, and with a nasty pleasure in its masculine authority — between me and whatever joy or lightness I could get in life. Then, with not much warning, he became my good friend and most essential companion. I felt the sweetness of his light bones and serious ideas, the vulnerability of his love, which I imagined to be much purer and more straightforward than my own. I could be greatly moved by an inflexibility, a harsh propriety, that at other times I scorned. I would
