Roadside Story
She was a tall, wide-shouldered young woman in jeans and a tank top, sitting on a roadside railing in the late afternoon, her face in her hands, her body heaving with sobs so strong that every one of us in the car was struck with a sudden, palpable impression of her grief, even though we were traveling past her at fifty miles an hour, in a stream of traffic on Maryland Route 404, on our way to a Delaware beach town we hoped to reach by early evening.
I was the driver, and it crossed my mind to stop, the way it always crosses your mind, at least momentarily, whenever you pass something unexpected or unexplained on the side of the road, even when you know it wouldn’t be a good idea. But the tight weekend traffic made it unthinkable; we were traveling faster than a decision.
What’s that about? someone in the car said.
~
What was that about?
First conclusions are often knee-jerk: she had been hitchhiking, was picked up and robbed, then abandoned, maybe assaulted, out of money and out of options. I hadn’t noticed anything beside her—no suitcase, backpack, guitar case.
Or. It had nothing to do with thumbing a ride or being robbed. In fact, she was a local, a native of rural Delaware who had grown up among sprawling corn fields, thirty or forty miles and an entire lifestyle away from the oceanside towns with their boardwalks and sunscreen-coated vacationers and pricey condos and beach houses, and today she was utterly heartbroken by a wedge of spiteful pain splitting open her life, a lovers’ fight, a long-time-coming nasty argument, her boyfriend—named Wade or Colt or Trace—abruptly stopping his truck on the side of the road, reaching across to open the passenger’s door and push her out.
~
Or. Her shoulder-heaving outpouring on the roadside was the result of a fight with her mother. Begun as a taut, awkward conversation, it progressed to her mother issuing an ultimatum about her furtive and incautious escapades with a boy who was older than her, who lived with only his father, and sported a reputation so scandalous that it gave not only the young woman’s parents but her own friends pause, an argument which escalated into a dish-tossing, raspy-voiced screaming match and ended with her running from her house.
The older boy had a Mohawk haircut and kept a straight-back pocket knife in a sheath snapped to his belt.
The older boy was a migrant farm worker named Jesus, or a young Mexican who stocked produce in the Tienda La Hispanita by the big roadside flea market.
The older boy was actually a married man, an assistant funeral director named Sherman.
~
Or. She had married young, and had just discovered that her husband Gary, an auto mechanic who installed carpet as a second job and was away a lot, had been cheating on her with a bank teller who favored lavender nail polish.
She wasn’t married at all, but facing an unexpected pregnancy.
She was married, and newly pregnant, but it was to Gary.
It was something darker, just revealed, something involving an uncle.
~
Her story pulsed in my head as we finished the drive to our condo. It was that glimpse of her face in her hands, her inconsolable sobs visible even to a passing car. Maybe those hands hid a sixteen-year-old face, and it was something silly, something adolescent that drove her to perch on a corrugated steel rail precariously close to a busy road, a rash thing to do, a foolish response to something that wasn’t truly grave enough to warrant the risk, wasn’t proportional to those shoulder-shuddering cries.
~
There is, of course, no way of knowing why she was sobbing. We didn’t go back.
But suppose we had. She might have been gone. She might have screamed in fright as we approached and run away. If she had simply needed a lift, we had no room in our overpacked car. Would we have squeezed her onto someone’s lap? How much would we have done for a frantic stranger on the roadside?
She was just a glimpse, a jarring glimpse of grief. She was an unexpected question, a loose end you can’t tie up.
Still, I hoped she would be one of those plucky survivors you read about, someone who escapes. I wanted that for her. Even though the only thing I could do was to put her at the center of some imagined story, as if its sentences could protect her on that roadside railing, as if they might be enough to keep her safe.
Bad Painting
In the center of the bad painting that hangs above your writing desk is a sprawling three-story house, pale orange and vaguely Victorian, with gables, taupe trim, a charming cupola. But who would place a house here? No pathway leads to it. There’s a carriage house with no horse or carriage in sight. The widow’s walk is empty, the lawn shaggy, willows and maples neglected.
Improbably, a young boy is running toward the house, wearing short pants and a striped jersey, an old-fashioned cap, a canvas book bag slung over his shoulder. The name you give him is also old-fashioned: Blair. If the architecture of the house and the boy’s costume-like clothing is to be trusted, you’d guess it was intended to be around the 1890s; a setting like upstate New York. Blair looks to be seven or eight, and wears a child’s vacuous smile as he scampers through the grass, seemingly unperturbed by the absence of a path, happy enough to find himself in this painting, even though its composition is idiosyncratic and flawed, the light totally unnatural.
His goofy smile begins to irk you. You wonder if the boy is a bit of a simpleton. He should be hot and sweaty, cranky in a child’s impatient way, because the expanse of grass he’s had to cover is truly ridiculous, taking up entirely too much space on the canvas. If it were you, you’d be cross; you’d want to blame someone, starting with the artist. You pause for a moment to consider if there’s also something negligent (even sinister) about a young boy with a book bag being alone in such a space. Are we really to believe that somewhere far out of the frame of this implausible landscape is an actual road, with a sensible horse-drawn school wagon trundling away, having deposited this boy here?
However, look closer and you can see something in a second-story window, which allows you to entertain the possibility that whatever’s in the window is what’s causing him to grin in anticipation, making him oblivious to the distance he’s had to run.
But the painter is clumsy: it might only be a flower-pot, or a blossoming plant. That wouldn’t justify his eagerness, so you have to conclude it’s a face; in fact, it’s his mother’s face. You name her Kathleen. What a poor foolish boy, you think. He believes she’s just back from shopping, still wearing her flowered hat, smiling down at her energetic son racing home from school. He expects that she’s brought him a new toy, or some candy, the way storybook mothers often do.
However, you know that she wasn’t really shopping. She brought home only one tiny bag, and it wasn’t a paper sack but a leather pouch, soft as chamois, containing a curious ring with a sapphire in an unusual setting. The ring was not a purchase at all but a gift from her lover, given to her just this afternoon.
You picture their tryst in a secret place. But your picture is by a much better painter, someone like Andrew Wyeth, who casts the scene in a haunting muted ochre light: a melancholy meadow with tall, soft grass, leading the eye to the two lovers, pale nudes in the shadow of an enormous tree placed provocatively toward the bottom half of the canvas.
In any event, Kathleen is now tightly hugging her red-faced panting son, urging him to tell her all about his day, loving him despite his ridiculous shorts and cap, wondering who in the world would have dressed him like that.
You now also have authorial responsibility for articulating a place in the story for Blair’s father—Kathleen’s husband—consigned as he currently is to a point outside of the painting, like that rickety wagon clattering in the unseen distance. You could simply make him a pompous ass in a tight waistcoat and wire-rimmed glasses, a Dickensian humbug who deserves to be a cuckold, who, like his young son, is oblivious to what his wife is up to. But that might make him little more than another cliched character in this somewhat pedestrian plot you’ve concocted.
Much more interesting to make him a painter himself, or, better yet, an author as well, the one who drew/wrote you into this story about an absurd painting. After all, you’ve already helped him expose his wife’s dalliance.
This thought makes you squint more strenuously at a small third-story window, where there just might be the face of someone crouching in the back of the room, barely visible, his hair rumpled from struggling all morning with how he’s going to write his way out of this story.
In a new version, he’s pruned the trees and watched his still-jolly son skip through newly-cut grass. His wife may or may not have left him for the lover in the other painting. But one thing is clear. He wants a new draft, a blank canvas. The boxes are already packed, labeled and taped shut. He is calling his son to come inside. I promise, he says. We’ll have new trees and a pathway and actual horses for the carriage. And much better lighting, gauzy and subtle. I know it seems like we just moved in, he says. But leave we must.
His son might very well object to a new draft, dragging his feet and pouting, hating this revised version and resenting it far into the future. But, the father patiently explains, you have to understand, that’s how stories get made.
