Chapter 4

Jane and I once figured out that we had moved to San Francisco simultaneously, in the spring of 1991. She had taken the northern route from Massachusetts through Wyoming and Montana, and I followed southern roads from St. Louis through Oklahoma, past the Grand Canyon, and on into the Mojave Desert.

After Mom died, I had started imagining that she watched me from high places, like city roofs or the tops of trees. I imagined she was urging me to leave home, even though saying good-bye to my father felt dangerous, and the image of his tall, silent figure waving in my rearview mirror would haunt me all the way to California.

Governed by Dad’s good sense, I’d flown out to San Francisco in advance and made a surgical strike, renting the first place I found, a one-room studio in the Haight-Ashbury district. I landed a job at Sorrell’s bookstore, fifty miles south of the city, near Stanford University, and to Dad’s amazement I was back in a flash and quickly packing.

To most of my family, my decision seemed sudden. For me, it was overdue. After Mom’s funeral in June, my brother flew back to his life in Washington, D.C., and my sister turned back to the distractions of medical school. Dad got back to work as quickly as possible and was gone from the house early every day.

Meanwhile, I spent the summer days lying on the roof in my bikini and long nights watching television. When the weather turned cold, I wandered our house and prowled my mother’s belongings. I was twenty-three, and the life that stretched before me had no shape or substance in my mind. The plans I’d had all my life faded to nothing as I baked in the sun, replaying old scenes with Mom, letting them roll behind my sunglasses like home movies. I watched us on the patio in spring, when I was still young enough to think our two acres and family encompassed the world. Mom had pulled weeds from between bricks while I plugged a fountainhead with my finger, releasing the water and then plugging it again. She had paused as I, drunk with some strange happiness, announced that I would live in St. Louis forever. When I was married, I told her, I would have a house next door. I would see her every day.

“I’d love that,” Mom admitted. “But there are a lot of exciting places in the world outside of St. Louis.” She waved her hand, as if to suggest the range of possibilities.

“I don’t want to see them,” I’d replied.

Mom said, “After I went to college, I almost moved to California.”

I unplugged the fountain and crossed my arms. “Really? Why?”

“Well, there was a young man …,” she ventured. Then she paused, unsure of how to develop that story for my ears.

“Dad?” I asked. When Mom shook her head, my smile faded.

“Your father wasn’t happy about my going,” she whispered. “But I’d only ever lived in St. Louis. And there was the young man …”

“So what happened?” I demanded.

“Oh. My car broke down in Kansas City. And by then I was pretty anxious about leaving my mother, your aunt Estie, and my brothers. And your father, too. I think I was a little scared. . . .”

“And you changed your mind,” I said approvingly.

“I did.” Mom smiled.

“And aren’t you glad?”

“Well. I’m awfully glad I married your father,” she said. “And I’m glad you’re here,” she added, winking.

“But sometimes I still think about California. Sometimes I wonder who I might have been if I had gone.”

Under the summer sun, I replayed that story. I replayed it until it grew into a mission, and then it became a plan. If my brother had his law career, and my sister her medicine, if my father had his work, if all of my friends were bouncing around the world and finding love, then the least I could do was aim past Kansas City and find this place called California.

I had high hopes for San Francisco. I’d read that Joan Baez lived near Sorrell’s and often visited the store, and I figured if she liked it, I would, too. I also fancied myself an up-and-coming hippie—I had a guitar, and an aging wardrobe—which fit in perfectly with my image of the city. Best of all, only a few people there knew me, so I’d have plenty of room to change everything about myself.

Looking back, I see San Francisco as a curious siren. Almost everyone I was about to meet had migrated west for their own vague reasons, following some strange instinct that promised hope. It was a place that seemed ripe with possibility; I was already envisioning my new life as a writer, filmmaker, and all-around free spirit. And Jane was pointed west then too, already transforming her problems and past into her own kind of fiction.

My drive began well enough. I was fueled by the prospect of adventure and the anticipation of a new and better me who would surely materialize as I crossed each border. Maybe I’d learn to play the guitar that was crammed into my backseat or become a filmmaker with the Super 8 resting on my dashboard. I wondered if I might fall in love with a young poet or have an affair with a Berkeley English professor.

The fantasy began to fade in Oklahoma. Solitary hours wore on me, and I fell back into old habits of talking to myself, of pretending I was a stand-up comedian, or Blanche DuBois, or Bruce Springsteen. I found new meaning in the song “Born to Run,” which I belted out my window and into the open sky, rewinding and singing it again until my voice was raw. Later, and suddenly, I was struck by tears— heavy, hiccupy tears that wouldn’t subside even when exhaustion set in. I wondered if this was what Mom had felt in Kansas City—the transiting sense of being caught between what you’ve left and lost, and the unknown ahead. As I drove, nothing I filled my mind with, from counting seconds between the power lines, to singing with the radio, dispelled the growing uneasiness inside me.

I paused long enough to point my Super 8 at the Grand Canyon, then made my way through the rest of Arizona and into the vast, vacant Mojave. I didn’t see a soul for hours, and with the desert sprawled before me, I became desperate for a sign of life. I was squinting hopefully at a glassy image materializing in the distance when my car hood suddenly made a popping sound and a river of oil oozed up my windshield. A loud cracking noise was followed by a brief shudder, then my little car limped to the side of the road in a cloud of steam and quit.

While I sat in the noon heat, pondering my next move, Jane was speeding up north. She had hitched a ride with a friend, and I can picture her reclined in the passenger seat, bare feet stuck out the window the way she liked to do. Depending on her mood, she might have been working the radio and singing along or braiding her hair and reading Anne Sexton or Hemingway.

When it came to authors or artists, Jane was drawn to people who had either gone crazy or killed themselves. Doing both was ideal. She had spent some time herself in a place she called the “loony bin,” and I later wondered if her habit of drawing razors across her skin might have started around then. I was never present to see, but Jane said she held her breath when she cut herself, piercing just enough to hurt but not so much as to leave visible scars. The minute she exhaled, she said, everything felt better.

“Imagine sinking into a hot bath on a cold night,” she would later tell me. “Over and over again.”

Jane didn’t talk much about the times she was sent away, and since she talked freely about everything else, I imagined it was bad. Stripped of her razors and confined with people at all extremes of mental distress, she said she took residence by a corner window lined with wire and sat there all day, thinking of what, I never learned. But later—on the occasions when Jane felt thwarted, threatened, or betrayed—I’d see her take root by our apartment window in the same way and detach with such completeness that I wondered if part of her wasn’t still latched to that dark place, frozen in time.

But as she rode west with her friend, I know Jane was thinking things were about to get better. I’m sure we both did, as we crossed the country that April.

My car breaking down did dent my optimism, though. It was a perfect, if obvious, metaphor. I had apparently “blown my head gasket,” which is the predictable result when flying through a scorching desert at one hundred miles per hour with the windows down and air-conditioning on full. Like my poor gasket, emptied of its oil and cracked in two, I sat broken in my shack of a motel room, in the middle of nowhere. And I was exhausted. I had walked a mile to an emergency phone, called for help, and trudged one mile back to my car. An hour later, a man in a lumbering pickup arrived and said he’d “hitch me right up,” which I hoped would mean “go back and get a nice clean AAA tow truck” but really meant “put a chain on my car and drag it to a motel/auto shop fifty miles outside of nowhere.” His name was Elmer, and he was completely bald on the top of his head, with a fringe of thin blond hair dripping down to his shoulders. His face was lean and tan and lined by the sun.

“We got no television or phones,” Elmer warned as we pulled into his small encampment. A tin sign hung over what looked like a barn, and it read ELMER’S AUTO BODY/OVERNIGHT. Next to the barn there were six little green cottages made of thin wood.

“You can have number five,” he said.

A little tear made its way down my cheek, and I remember Elmer calling his “boys” out to “look at this.” Four men of varying ages emerged blinking from the barn, and they lit up cigarettes while I sat on a tire, turned away from them, and wept.

“Head gasket,” Elmer said to the boys. They nodded and started opening beers.

“Got to go way on to Appleton for that,” one man said. “Radiator?”

Elmer patted my car hood. “Probably shot to hell.” He asked one of the boys to show me to number five.

A wind started kicking up as I stepped inside the room. It blew right through the walls and tossed my hair. The fellow who led me in said he was Louis, and he watched me from the doorway as I sat on the bed with my purse on my knees and tried to look composed.

“Are there other people here?” I asked.

Louis looked puzzled.

“Are there other guests?”

He chuckled. “Naw. Not many folks come out this way. At least not on purpose. We go home on the weekends ourselves.”

I used every ounce of strength not to entertain Louis with more tears. He seemed to be waiting for them to come.

“Got a quarter?” he asked brightly. He pointed to a coin slot beside my bed. “Pop one in there and it shakes.” Then he winked and shut the door behind him.

After a while I wondered about food. I had been watching Elmer and his boys through my window, waiting to see if they ate. Finally, I stepped outside and approached the barn. They were sitting on crates, eating sandwiches and drinking more beer. Elmer said hello and I asked about the food and he said they cooked in their rooms, but that I could order pizza because a number was scratched on the glass in the phone booth outside.

I backed out of the barn and went to find the phone booth, fighting harder winds. I spotted it way out in the desert, leaning a little, a good quarter mile away. When I arrived at the booth, anxious and out of breath, I found messages carved into the glass like the last words of some lost civilization. I half expected to see a pile of skeletons at my feet.

I located the Domino’s number, ordered a large pizza with three Cokes, and then returned to my cottage window to wait. Sometime later a dot appeared on the darkening horizon, growing into the shape of a white Honda civic. I rushed out to greet my hero, who looked to be barely sixteen, with a sloping smile and bad skin.

“One large and three Cokes,” he said, touching his cap. I downed an entire slice as I paid him.

“Goddamn,” he said, impressed.

“I’m stranded,” I said. “Please don’t go.”

The boy laughed. “Elmer’s okay,” he said, climbing into his car. “Watch out for the other guys.” And with that, my link to civilization peeled off into the distance.

After finishing half the pizza and two Cokes in my room, I went back to the phone booth. By now the wind was furious, and my long hair went horizontal as I stepped in slow motion across the sand. I had a radio in my room, and a newscaster had said that a record-breaking windstorm was in progress, reaching speeds of up to seventy miles per hour. He said the space shuttle Atlantis, which was due to land that very afternoon, had to keep orbiting because of the wind. When I finally made it inside the phone booth and finished spitting out mouthfuls of sand, I dialed my father collect. The minute I heard his voice I started to cry again, loud and hard, until he finally had to shout over the phone.

“Are you hurt?” he yelled. “Where are you?” That released a whole new level of sobbing, matched only by the howling wind.

“I am going to wait until you stop,” Dad yelled.

I imagined him on our blacktop with a megaphone, calling across the miles between us. After a while I slumped against the phone booth and quieted.

Dad’s voice was calm. “Where are you, Caroline?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You don’t know?”

“Correct.”

“Do you know what state you are in?”

I looked around.

“Well, it’s pretty windy.”

Dad cleared his throat. “Well, that’s not a lot to go on.”

Having not yet ascertained if I was bleeding, drugged, or kidnapped, my father was probably losing his patience.

“Elmer’s Auto Body/Overnight,” I said, squinting at the sign. It was shaking in the wind. “I’m in the desert, that’s for sure. Probably California. They said my car blew the something gasket.”

Dad sighed. “Is there someone there I can talk to?”

“Why?”

“Because California is a large state, and I’d like to know exactly where you are.”

Bless him, I wanted to know that, too.

“I think everybody’s sleeping off their beers,” I said. “I’m staying in a one-room cottage next to a barn where five men seem to fix cars. Last I saw, they were pretty drunk.”

“Oh, God,” Dad said. “Don’t wake them.”

“No, I won’t.”

“Is there a number where I can call you?” he asked.

“Well, it’s a phone booth,” I said, “and the number is gone.”

I began scratching my name into the glass with a key. I put it under a fading inscription that read “Welcome to Nowhere.” Dad and I were quiet on the phone.

“So is Gayle there?” I asked. She was Dad’s first attempt at dating, and last I’d checked they weremaking progress.

“No,” he said.

“Oh. Did you eat dinner yet?”

“Yes.”

I was quiet again.

“Pasta,” Dad added.

I finished my name and started on Mom’s. “Are you missing Mom tonight?” I asked. It was a stupid question, but I wanted to hear him say it.

“Every night,” he said.

The names Caroline and Monny—short for Madeleine—were now permanently recorded on the glass. I started on Dad’s name, Frederick. I already felt sorry for the next person who found himself standing in this phone booth, reading the names of other lost travelers as they dialed for pizza.

“Anyway, check the news tonight,” I said.

“Why?”

“I’m in the middle of the world’s biggest windstorm, and the space shuttle can’t land. If they show a map, you’ll know where I am.” On that note I signed off and hurled myself through the wind back into the cottage. On my way, I saw one of Elmer’s boys taking a cardboard box out of the trunk of my car. He set it on the ground and opened it.

“Hey!” I yelled, but my voice came back at me in the wind. I saw him pull out several books and my wooden box of letters, which were too precious to send with movers. I ran toward my car, this time pushed by the wind, and skidded to a stop, inches from the man. His shirt said CLEM. “What are you doing?” I asked. “That’s mine.” I had to shout over the wind.

Clem nudged the box with his foot. “Just curious,” he said. My Swiss Army knife was sticking out of Clem’s pocket. I reached for it and he batted my hand. I stepped back. Clem folded his arms, amused. Feeling suddenly, completely alone, I bent down and cautiously picked up my box. Clem sat on a crate and watched me while I shuttled the contents of my car into my room.

During the night I hung on to my mattress and waited for the roof to fly off. The wind rushed against my face and howled through the slats in the walls. I was tempted to relocate to my car but thought I might encounter one of Elmer’s boys or get swept into the heavens on the way. Later in the night I thought I saw shadows passing my window. Then I was sure I heard voices. After one said my name, I quietly pushed my bed in front of the door, and stayed awake until morning.

By the time light appeared, the wind had stopped. I stepped outside and saw bottles around my door.

I set my jaw and went directly to the barn to ask Elmer when my car would be ready. He thought for a moment, then estimated that I had at least two more days before I was going anywhere, probably three. The boys stood behind Elmer and agreed.

My expression would have been panic when, of all things, a police car rounded the corner and pulled right up beside us. A uniformed fellow stepped lightly out of his cruiser and walked over. He was on the older side and rugged, way over six feet, with a big round gut. His badge said “Officer Hunt.”

“Are you Caroline Kraus?” he asked me.

I said I was.

“Well, your daddy called us last night over in Appleton, and he asked us to check on you.”

Elmer pushed his cap back on his head and looked at the policeman. “She’s fine,” he said. The boys were hiding behind an old junk car, not too eager to be seen.

“I see she is,” the policeman said. He walked toward the junk car and sent the boys flying in all directions. Then he looked at Elmer and said, “Where do they think they’re going? Clear across the desert?”

Elmer stood, scratched his chin, and said something about my car maybe getting fixed that day. Maybe in an hour.

“That’s good news!” The policeman looked at me. “Isn’t that good news?”

I watched the boys skirt around the cottages, grabbing duffel bags and shouting at each other, and thought that it surely was good news.

I waited in the police car while Elmer tinkered with mine. After talking to Elmer privately, Officer Hunt joined me. From time to time, the police radio squawked about this or that problem at a faraway residence or traffic light, and Officer Hunt’s eyes narrowed as he listened, and then he relaxed. After a bit he turned to me.

“Good parents,” he said.

“What?”

“Looking after you all the way out here.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but my mother is dead.” I looked away, confused by my confession.

“Oh,” Officer Hunt said. He cleared his throat and squinted at the sun. I felt like holding his hand, he looked so hurt.

When Elmer finished, he asked for $800, all the money I had in traveler’s checks. He said he didn’t believe in “plastic money,” so I signed my checks over as fast as I could, shook hands with Officer Hunt, and tore away.

Elmer’s shop was still visible in my rearview mirror when three squad cars appeared, then flew past me, lights ablaze. My heart pounded. I wondered how close I’d come to any number of horrors. I wished I could throw my arms around my father, who must have stayed up all night looking for a police station somewhere in the California desert, near a place where a space shuttle apparently couldn’t land.

I said a prayer for the Officer Hunts of the world, who troubled themselves with girls like me, and accelerated west. I didn’t realize it then, but I was leaving the last zone of my father’s protective reach. And it must have been terrifying for him, to know his youngest was moving away so fast, crossing borders he could not see or hope to understand.

I fueled up and drove all day, arriving in San Francisco late at night. My little studio was the basement floor of a three-story Victorian at the steep top of Masonic Street. It had one big window with a partial view of passing feet. Which was a strange perspective—over time I would come to see my neighborhood as an energetic population of shoes.

I unloaded my car into the tiny room, collapsing in a pile of clothes and boxes and falling sound asleep until morning.

Over on Castro Street, Jane was in her temporary lodging, an apartment belonging to her friend. When the sun rose, we would both wake to our new surroundings.

We had both arrived. Both driven as far as we could.