Movement is Life

As we pulled onto the freeway, the house, all bricks and windows, dwindled until it was the size of the Lego coffin I built for my Nancy Drew doll and then buried (and now abandoned) in its front yard, forever hidden from my brothers’ scorn. I sat in the back seat of Momma's dusty, green, Oldsmobile sedan, knees tucked under me, facing the rear window, my arms crossed, chin cradled in the hollow of the rear deck only now remembering my doll.

I sighed and turned, placing my feet on the armrest between the driver and passenger seats. I sat in the middle of the backseat, squeezed between my sister and brother. Cheryl tucked into a ball and her Raggedy Ann doll held between her head and the passenger window to soften the rocking of the car — Ann mockingly living above ground.

Doug sat on my left, his head lolled back on the rear seat and his eyes staring absently at the bubble in the roof where the felt had come undone and drooped as if it were full of water and about to burst. His black hair whipped in the wind from Momma’s open window, her arm resting on the sill so her elbow cut through the darkness leaving a wake behind us only to be broken by her wiping tears from her eyes.

"Why are we leaving, Momma?" Mitchell asked from the front seat -- his "rightful" place as the oldest. The headlights behind us flashed briefly, throwing his reflection onto the front windshield so I could see his strong jaw and defiant eyes flashing fear as he asked, "What did we do this time? Where are you taking us?"

"Ya didn't do anything, honey. It wasn't you," Momma said, her eyes holding mine in the rearview mirror.

"Daddy and I just need some time away from each other." As her voice trailed off so did her gaze, returning to the white reflectors dividing the lanes like landing strips, the Oldsmobile ornament landing our approach back to our old lives and away from Dad’s new life alone.

I was only seven and the youngest, but I knew it wasn't about them this time, them being my two brothers; although they were the reason we moved to Kentucky and the reason we built the brick house one plastic brick at a time. We were like two sets of children, Mitchell and Doug, then Cheryl and I -- a six-year gap that would never be closed. Drugs and alcohol and the wrong crowd were left behind in Louisiana, just more abandoned boxes in a coffin-house made of wood.

I had overheard enough to understand if not articulate that my family's move to Kentucky was one last effort to save my brothers from the future that was written as darkly on their skin as the tattoos they had drawn with ink and a sewing needle on each other's arms. Even at seven, I recognized their power, pulling us away from everything for a chance to give them something.

But this current dash into the darkness wasn't about them. It was about my father, a shadow of a man shrouded in a house built mostly by his own hands.

I thought about my bedroom in that house, my first (and last) to call my own, a lamp in the shape of a drum sitting in the corner near a vent in the floor through which my sister and I would whisper to each other at night. Her room the color of sunflowers. My brothers' as far from us as possible, in the basement, unfinished, left for last. I oddly remember my mother admonishing them for the condition of their own bathroom, focusing specifically on the urine that had splashed around the bowl, streaking the cabinet, markings I remember tracing with my finger and shamefully licking to try and taste their maturity.

Earlier, Momma had gathered us kids around her, our eyes still filled with sleep and hers as red as my father's, but for different reasons I didn't yet comprehend. They had launched missiles at each other as we all sat in the den, Momma's voice cracking, my father's chin jutting out at us from the thick armchair he sat in like a man on trial. Mitchell and Doug together on the couch, a tectonic plate moving imperceptibly away from my sister and me. I don't remember any words, just the smell of the ashes in the fireplace weighing down the air like the smoke of a funeral pyre.

Then, it was time to say good-bye, my sister already crying, not understanding, holding my mother's hand. She held Ann in the other, red curls of yarn dragging the floor. With his hug, Dad's coarse shadow tickled my cheek, and I breathed in the sickly smell of his solitary sentence.

From my left in the rear seat, Doug joined in the questions, my mother weakening. The questions circled the interior of the car, hungry for answers.

I peered into the cold, wet night that stretched ahead of us with the texture of black licorice. As I watched cars speeding past us, I tried to imagine the lives inside by searching for clues in quick glances. I spotted toys in the back windows; a bike sticking out of a trunk; a canoe tied to the luggage rack on someone's roof. I'd catch faces halo-ed by the headlamps of the car behind them and tried to imagine their lives. Where were they going, where had they been and what lay buried in the front yard of the homes they were fleeing? I think now that I must have hoped for a glimpse of another boy's eyes that would tell me things are better just up ahead, around the next curve, past the next town, and the one after that.

I never saw him, that other kid, for I felt the car slow down and the wheels throw up sand and rocks as we pulled to the shoulder. Mitchell and Doug were leaning forward toward Momma who slumped in her seat, the fight in her eyes dwindling until it too ducked out of sight behind the black candy of night.

"Do ya want to go back? Is that what ya want? To go back?"

She looked at each of us in turn: Mitchel, Doug, Cheryl— her cheek wrinkled and red from the print of Ann's dress — and finally me. My brothers shouted "Yes!" and Cheryl nodded agreement. Cars passed us in a whoosh of a whisper, speeding off to something different and Momma held my eyes in the rearview mirror like I was a favored child.

I didn't have the words then that I do now. I had yet to feel the ease of slipping into a car like a favorite pair of jeans stained with life and frayed by despair. There's never anything shiny and new about the cars I've owned; they creak and thump and hiccup toward my destination. But I love to drive them, the many of them.

I know nothing of cars; how to change the oil, why you'd rotate the tires, or why the mechanic laughed when I told him that I needed my Cadillac convertible checked while unknowingly leaning confidently on my two-door Chevy Scooter. It wasn't important, like the red light that flashed at me from the console of the Ford diesel, a tank of a car, as I sped from Louisiana as a college freshman. Three hundred miles covered until it gave its last gasp and blew a rod just as I was entering Dallas Texas's city limits.

My car is and always has been filled with the detritus of my life: my favorite hiking stick; bricks from a burned down building kept for their sentimental value; a change of clothes, both clean and dirty, where the spare should be; an empty box of Tide used to file never opened bills; a beach towel still smelling of tanning oil. They are like stickers on a suitcase, proof that I'm just passing through. I don't clean out my cars until passengers have to wriggle their feet through Burger King bags and cigarette cellophane to find uncertain purchase on the floor, soft with filth, until they declare they won't ride with me anymore. Only then do I scoop out the trash with a sense of remorse, not for allowing the mess, but for the clean seats and spotless windows that will feel like someone had ironed my favorite jeans, all creases, stiff with starch, an uncomfortable skin to wear.

No, it's when, like now, turning onto I-80 and the Sacramento skyline fills the rearview mirror like my mother’s eyes. The trash is piled high in the back seat and the driver side is like a hole that I bury myself in, the window rolled down to hear the night wind sing to me that I'm no longer where I was just moments before; that all is going to be alright because I have everything I need near me. Like Momma in our green sedan, I rest my elbow on the sill, it fits perfectly in the crook of the two bony knobs of my elbow, my wrist slightly folded and thumb pressed gently against the leather of the steering wheel conveying my thoughts to the tires with each turn of the axel as we drive outward, onward, awayward.

It's not the destination that matters. It's the getting there, the thump thump of the tires over the asphalt causing the car to rock me like a baby, the radio a mother’s small voice whispering "Everything's going to be fine."

I didn't have the words then when her eyes seemed to plead with me to understand. If I had been capable then, I would have said that we need to keep going. That we need to get back on the freeway and just drive. That it's the going that matters. That when you stop, every decision you've ever made wraps itself around you like a plastic bag, cinched and tight. That the house we had built on the hill, that my father serving time in his chair, that my brothers with their failing grades, wrong kinds of friends, and blossoming addictions, that my sister's fear of people and my urgent need to be visible were all black ink on a page, scripted out, waiting for us to spend the next decades speaking the words into existence. That when you're driving, you're not connected to anyone or anything, the pages as blank as the faces that sped past us there on the side of the road; my family lit by the street lamps like flashes from a Polaroid camera. Our escape captured in sepia and pressed to the sticky page, blurred by the clear cellophane of childhood remembrance.

But I didn't have the words.

And I felt a tightening in my throat as she took my silence as consent, turning the car back onto the freeway and taking the off ramp that looped its way back around to steer us home. My mother rolled up the window and our breaths fogged the windows. She seemed resigned, assured by the fact that something she knew waited.

I too knew what was waiting, and it was the known that I choked on. The smell of burnt plastic stinging my throat. I was desperate for the clean taste of the night wind but found only my stale breath as I felt the cinching of the bag, us going back home to join the condemned.

And the pages that had been written, as if preordained, lay open in front of us, waiting for us to simply speak them.