In fact, in the last few years my mom and dad had been having this ongoing thing about how slow I am. He said I was lazy, didn’t care, wanted to do something to rebel against him. She said he was too cheap to get me tested; she was sure I saw words backward and something could be done about it. My father, though, said I was being dumb on purpose, that it was tough being the principal’s kid, trying to be perfect like everyone would expect. I hate to disappoint him, but I never was after perfect. And now it wasn’t going to matter anyway. I figured when they found out I was a pervert, my grades were going to seem like nothing.
So there my mother was, telling the highway patrol cop that I might just read all the words on the test backward, which of course embarrassed the hell out of me. Told the cop she’d like to sit close to make sure I didn’t read all the STOP signs as POTS signs. And then she laughed. My mother has this crazy laugh; she’s so little that it sounds like she’s borrowed a tuba. And I guess by carrying on with the cop, she thought she’d loosen us all up. But he said, “Don’t worry, lady, if he can’t tell Stop from Pots, he ain’t passin’ anyway.”
That sure filled me with great confidence. So when he put my head into the eye-check machine, I called all the P’s B’s and all the M’s W’s, which, if nothing else, proved that my mom wasn’t nuts or trying to cheat.
Then the cop pulled out my test score. “Seems to me, “ he said to my mother, “he sees upside down and inside out, too—or maybe you already know that.”
Right away I established myself as a potential driving freak.
When the cop told me to follow him into this room and sit by myself and take the written part of the test the best I could, he left me there and slapped me on the back on his way out. “Shoot, don’t worry, kid,” he said. “We got eighty-year-olds taking this test and passing.”
For a while I wasn’t able to do anything or get started. I just sat there counting up all the times I could take the test before I turned eighty. I saw myself on one of those three-wheeled bicycles, carrying groceries back to the nursing home. And I’d always be bumming rides or taking the bus or hitchhiking. I’d have to skip the prom, and I’d never get to take a girl out to the cemetery, where everybody goes to park.
I got myself so worked up I couldn’t read any of the questions or have them make sense. I could barely breathe, and my pits were dripping. I counted every third word and chose an answer based on the last letter of that third word. It was a complicated system, but it gave me answers. Then I went out into the waiting room. And while the cop graded my paper, my mother and I prayed.
The thing was, you see, since the divorce my mother had gotten a job at the county dump, was driving an hour every day back and forth, and had had to put George in day care. And there was no way for us to get him before my mom stopped for him on the way home, which was usually close to seven. My father, who Mom calls George the First, wasn’t much help. He said he was too busy being the principal. So if I could have gotten a car, any old car, when I turned sixteen, and had my real license, I could be the one to back my mother up. Do all the things she now wasn’t home to do. She was counting on me.
“Sorry, kid,” the cop said. “Want to take this booklet and sit over there and study it awhile and try again in a few minutes?”
It was almost dark when I got out, walking with my mother back to our car in the parking lot. I’d passed on the third try, after I’d changed my system from choosing every last letter of the third word to the fourth. My mother hugged me. “Wanna drive home?” She handed me the keys.
I opened the door to the car, got in the front seat behind the wheel where I’d been only a few times before, and most often as a kid playing. With a learner’s permit, I had to have with me somebody with a license every time I drove, and we both knew that meant mostly her. She looked at me. “Go ahead,” she said. Under her breath, high and faint, she was humming, reminding me of the electric buzz of a light bulb about to wear out.
“Guess we better use these.” She laughed, pulling out the straps to the seat belt. “It’s the law, now, you know,” which she said like she wasn’t worried a bit about sitting in the death seat.
I turned the key in the ignition, put my foot down on the accelerator.
In a few minutes my hair was blowing back in the wind from the open window.It was a twenty-minute drive to Palm Key, and on the way home we had to stop to get George out of day care and to pick up Mandy at a Girl Scout meeting over at the church. When I turned onto the highway that in about ten miles would lead across the bridges into Palm Key,I gunned it. When I could, I glanced over at my mother. She was gripping the handle of her purse in her lap like she was hanging onto the handle of a trapeze. Yeah, we were really bookin’, now. Loose. Our hair wild. I would have driven us straight out of The Here and Now, would have pushed my mother through to the other side of I-didn’t-know-what (but had to be better than where we were). If I could.
But when I looked down at the needle on the speedometer, its spidery little hand was hanging on forty, just sitting there like a line I hadn’t even known I’d drawn.
2.
Linda
I didn’t choose this place; it chose me. We’d been driving down the coast of Florida, George and I; I was three months pregnant with Drew, just enough to know for sure—which I hid from my mother and, God knows, forever from my father. A week later I would tell them I had eloped, then remind them how much a real wedding would have cost. (And for anybody who thinks like my mother, I’d like to add that getting pregnant before the ring is wound around the fourth finger doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a hussy, slut, or whore. It took me a long time to convince myself of that. And I never did, my mother.)
So George and I were looking for a romantic place where we could be married. The only place we could afford was here, not in a ritzy part of Florida, but on the mud coast, as it is called. Or the Redneck Riviera. I didn’t know that then, had never heard it called anything, but it was a place definitely out of the way; and it was the sky at Palm Key that chose me.
Standing on a pier that jutted out into the Gulf, as though with one more step westward we would fall off the earth, George and I looked out at the sky and the late afternoon sun. The tide was in, and the lap of water was all around under me. Two porpoises fed in the gray water just in front of us, breaking through the surface, then disappearing under it, in and out as if they were curved needles sewing the Gulf. And as far as I could turn my head there was sky, all sky. As I moved my feet, turning more, hearing the gentle tap and scrape of my sandals on the gray weathered pier, still there was more sky. It was as though I was standing inside a glass bowl, slate blue, clear, and forever changing. The clouds sat like huge swirls of cream with the sun going down through them in streaks of pink, reminding me of juice dripping from a sliced strawberry, while quietly beside me a big brown pelican landed on a pole near the pier, and looked around, too. For a second his eyes and mine met: the sharp black buttons of a fish hunter, and the girlish pools of a mother-to-be, a little anxious, yet anchored by love.
The sunset was so beautiful it made me know who I was: small and finite, a privileged watcher of porpoises and suns and pelicans landing now and then. And all of this was punctuated even more by the small tender swelling of Drew inside me.
George’s arm was around my waist, his hand riding above my hips, his fingers warm against me. So gentle and sweet. Simply, it was, I guess, a sky and place we could not say no to—or leave. And George decided right there and then that he would apply to the local school for a teaching job, while I saw in the sky the colors of paintings that would fill my lifetime.