Lone Star

16

Modern Travel

Chloe

Chloe truly hoped, really and truly, that the bulk of the twenty-one precious days in life-changing lands would be better than the travel to said lands because the travel sucked. If Dante lived now, what a book he’d write about the road to hell. Long, full of delays, unforeseen and expected trouble, stultifying waiting, wrong seats, terrible food, numb swollen legs, aching back head knees neck throat and throbbing glands—and not any glands that would be fun, at least theoretically, to have throbbing.

She had never traveled before, except in a car with her parents, and this wasn’t at all as she imagined, or as the movies made it out to be. It wasn’t in the least romantic. This was more like being stuck for nineteen hours in motionless traffic on the highway, except less comfortable, because instead of being inside a car, it felt as if the car were on top of Chloe. The carry-on backpack that weighed ten pounds when they left the house now felt like a hundred and ten. One of the wheels on the old suitcase was busted, so Chloe had to half-drag, half-carry it. Then it ended up being over the luggage limit by six pounds. It was either pay a hundred more dollars or lighten the load by one umbrella (she hoped it wouldn’t rain), two bottles of shampoo (how important was clean hair, anyway?), and two books (who had time to read?).

Before Chloe could lighten the load she was asked a ton of questions of punishing stupidity. Did you pack this yourself? She didn’t know what to say. Yes? But also—no. Her mother helped her. Was she allowed to mention she had a mother?

Did anyone else help you with your bags?

“Do you mean pack them? Or carry them?”

The lady pinpointed her contemptuous gaze on Chloe. “Just answer the question, young lady.”

“I want to. I just don’t know how to.”

“What don’t you get? Did anyone help you with your bags?”

“Pack them or carry them?” Mason helped her to carry them. Hannah helped her pack. Not just Hannah, but her mother and father, and Blake threw in a notebook, damn it. If it weren’t for his notebook, she could’ve kept her umbrella.

“Oh my God, I can’t do this today,” the lady said. “Either. Or.”

“No,” said Chloe, sweat running down her aching back.

The woman looked ready to punch Chloe in the head.

They had left home at nine in the morning for a 6 p.m. flight out of Logan. They had a four-hour drive to Boston, a burger lunch, and a wait in line. It was scary saying goodbye to her mother. Chloe acted like she was cool with it, but inside she was all stuttering ambivalence. What if something went wrong? Who would fix it? What if she lost her suitcase? What if she was robbed? What if all her money was gone? What if she couldn’t find Varda’s house? What if no one spoke English?

What Chloe dreaded most was the worst of all possible scenarios: a desperate need for a mother and no mother.

They had been right, her parents. Damn. She was too young to go anywhere. She could make it to the water slide in North Conway, twenty-eight miles away, but that was about it. She could deliver hot meals to old people. In the airport when Lang asked if she would be okay, Chloe said, of course, barely looking in her mother’s direction. Do you want me to stay? Lang asked. No, we’ll be fine, Blake piped up in his booming voice. Don’t worry. We’ll take care of her. Where was Chloe’s dad? He wanted to come, but couldn’t fit in the truck. Where was Terri Gramm? At L.L.Bean, unpacking the fall windbreakers. That’s why Hannah was real-calm, not fake-calm. She was already adult and on her own.

Hannah had bleached her hair before they left. It was Marilyn Monroe blonde now, squeaky straight, very short, and brushed back severely off her face. The electrified blonde bob made her look even more exotic. Hot damn.

They were late taxiing off, and Chloe imagined all horrors, and she meant all horrors, lurking under the belly of the plane while she bit her nails on the runway. How does a plane fly at night? How can the pilot see? Does the plane have headlights, like Mom’s car? But there are no roads. She kept her terrified musings to herself, gnawing on her nails to stop herself from running screaming from her seat. Hannah sat across the aisle with Blake. Mason was one seat in front of Chloe. They couldn’t even sit together. Mason kept writing notes to Chloe on tiny plane napkins and passing them back, as if in Science class. Whatcha doin? You excited? You hungry? You love me? I can’t wait. Look up, I’m smiling at you. Look between the seats, I’m blowing you a kiss. You think we can get postcards when we get to Riga? I want to send one home.

To that last one, she wrote back on her own tiny napkin. Who do you want to send postcards to?

Dunno, came his answer. Kids at school.

What kids?

Dunno. All of them. With a heart at the end.

In the car on the way to Logan, Chloe and Hannah had talked about two butch-looking girls they’d seen holding hands at L.L.Bean, and Chloe said out of nowhere, I bet Mackenzie is a lesbian, and Mason said, why would you say that, and Hannah said, Mason, what do you care if Chloe thinks Mackenzie is a lesbian. And even Blake said, yeah, bro. And Mason said nothing. Why did she remember this? Now he was sleeping. Chloe knew this because he stopped writing her love napkins.

Across the aisle Hannah kept her eyes closed while Blake chatted away, leaning his head against the middle seat, whispering, stage-whispering, joking, laughing, poking her, expounding, trying to get her to open her eyes and look into his notebook. Hannah wouldn’t play. Blake, she kept repeating. I want to sleep. But how can you sleep? This is so exciting.

Blake.

Wake up.

Blake.

Wake up.

“Blake!” That was Chloe, hissing. “Shut up.”

Chewing the cap off his pen, Blake feverishly wrote in his journal, occasionally glancing over at Chloe. You okay? he kept mouthing.

What are you writing? she whispered. He held it up, as if by its cover she’d know. It’s my “back” journal, he said. That’s what the Russians call it. For everything else but the main story.

How would he even know that? What Russians?

Chloe didn’t want to tell him she wasn’t okay, because there was no way to explain why she wasn’t, since she didn’t herself know, and so she nodded and closed her eyes, and then quickly opened them again because she didn’t want to miss the food trolley. Chloe loved to eat. Hannah missed it. She didn’t care about food at all. She once said to Chloe, maybe if you stopped with all that cereal and milk, your boobs wouldn’t have grown so big.

The lights were turned off, the movies came on, the headphones came out. Most people slept, or played computer games, or leafed through magazines. Chloe tried to read a book, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, but couldn’t concentrate. She left to go to the bathroom, and Blake somehow hurled himself over a fake-sleeping Hannah and followed Chloe down the aisle.

“You can’t sleep either, right? It’s too exciting.”

“It’s many things,” she said.

“Exciting is definitely one of them, right?”

“Many things.”

“But exciting is one of them?”

It was pretty far down the list. Chloe didn’t say it. They waited for the bathroom.

“I think I packed too much stuff,” he said. He sounded so chipper. “Too many T-shirts and jeans. Where are we going to do laundry? I didn’t bring twenty-one pairs of jeans. Mase and I brought five hundred dollars spending money. You think that’ll be enough?”

“If you don’t eat, yes.”

He laughed. Sleeping people opened their eyes and glared.

“I’m glad we’re staying with your grandmother,” Blake said, only a notch quieter. “She’ll feed us.”

“She’s not my grandmother,” said Chloe. “My grandmother is in Fryeburg. Moody. You know her.”

“What about the other one—in Peking?” He tilted his teasing head.

Why? Why?

“It hasn’t been called Peking in over twenty years, one,” Chloe said, swatting him like a harassing fly, “and two, my mother’s mother’s mother’s mother never set foot in China. How many times do I have to say it?”

“What? No. I’ve never heard this story. Do tell.”

They didn’t want to go back to their seats so they loitered near the food cart and verbally abused the awful cookies to pass the time.

The flight dragged on. When Chloe thought they must be halfway around the world, in Singapore or someplace, they finally landed—but not in Riga. In Paris. Hannah was excited, but did they see Paris? No. They saw a Parisian airport. Four-hour layover. They wandered around, washed their faces, split two breakfast buns and two coffees, perused the duty free, put on some makeup (girls) and examined the liquor bottles (boys), then checked how much time they had left: three more hours. Having slept on the plane, Mason was refreshed, having fake-slept, Hannah sore and silent. Blake was exactly the same as he had been seven hours earlier, fourteen hours earlier, nineteen years earlier.

They bought a newspaper and Hannah pretended she could read French. Five minutes of mocking her passed the time. It would have been longer if she’d had a sense of humor. They checked out the naughty magazines, not even decorously covered up by brown paper. They were so progressive in Europe, Blake said, so advanced. Bless them, said Mason.

The girls were getting more and more impatient. “You’re looking at it all wrong,” Blake said. “It has to take a long time to get where we’re going, because we are leaving our old life behind. By the time we arrive in the new world, we are reborn. It’s supposed to take a long time, don’t you get it?”

“This is torture,” Hannah said. “What’s wrong with you that you don’t see it?”

“This is fantastic,” Blake said. “I’ve never been on a plane before. Or in an airport terminal. Never met a French person. Or seen a French blue magazine.” He winked with delight. “I’m writing down my impressions in the back journal. Who has time to be ornery?”

Hannah asked if Blake could write down his impressions silently, mutely, off.

Blake didn’t think he could. On the flight from Paris to Riga, the brothers sat together and the girls sat in front of them. The guys kept throwing paper over the seats, pulling the girls’ hair, whispering, laughing.

Questions of Punishing Stupidity Part II: Customs control.

Are you bringing anything into Latvia? Are you carrying contraband? She didn’t even know what contraband was. How could she know if she was carrying it? Are you carrying drugs?

What is your business in Latvia?

What is your destination?

The Latvian customs control were philosophers! Did they mean today? Where was she headed after she left the airport? Or did they mean the destination from which she would fly home? Or the destination to which she was headed in five short weeks, not in Riga, not in Maine, not in Spain, but far far away, in a distant land of saints, palms and stucco. What was her destination indeed, damn them.

Mason

Last month when Blake and I went to fix Lupe’s rotted-out pantry shelves, she said to us that we all float on a boat down a river of Truth that keeps dividing and dividing into tributaries that reunite, and once we reach the sea, we die. We spend our whole existence arguing with each other about which tributary leads to the main stream. “But they all lead to the same place,” she said.

I saved it for later to understand. The later is now. Because I’m trying to look out the window, and all the others are doing is arguing.

Lupe also told Blake that a wise man does three things. First, he does himself that which he advises others to do. (I don’t know if I do that.) Second, he doesn’t do anything that contravenes the Truth. (What is this river of Truth?) And third, he is patient with the weaknesses of those who surround him. (I am definitely not that.) She said Blake was all three.

Blake says he loves that woman. But I don’t know if I agree with her. He keeps borrowing Mom’s car to drive over there and take her to the doctor. There’s always yelling at home now because the four of us are trying to make do with one car and a loaner, a beaten-up jalopy with pistons that misfire in two of its four lousy cylinders. Blake causes strife in our house. I ask you, how wise is that? And how tolerant of it am I? He says Lupe needs a new fire pit. I tell him Mom needs her car, Dad needs a new back, and I need to get to a varsity reunion. Everybody needs something.

I thought that in Europe there’d be no yelling. Silly me. Here I am, in the cab from the airport, my face to the window. Please tell me I will find something here other than strife.

Hannah doesn’t like to travel. Oh, she talks a good game about how she’s going to travel all over the world for some job, translating or something, but I truly believe it’s a fantasy. She hates to go anywhere. I don’t know why she wanted to go to Europe with Chloe. When Chloe told me she and Hannah were heading to Barcelona, I wanted to remind my girlfriend of the few days the previous winter when the four of us went to Franconia to ski. The lift had broken after our first run. There was a blizzard, followed by an avalanche. We were snowed in for four days, with no power, no TV, no radio. Hannah nearly went mad, and we were an hour away from home.

No one lost a limb. No one starved. No one froze. We were just stuck. It hadn’t gone as we planned. But we had a fire, we shoveled snow, we went sledding and snowboarding until they came and cleared the road. We sang songs, and ate cans of Campbell’s soup from the cupboard, stale cereal, almonds, pretzels, pork rind, and talked about life. We played Scrabble and charades and cards, and Risk. It wasn’t glorious skiing, but three of us thought it was fun. Not Hannah. She said it was the worst four days of her life.

Blake laughed it off. He thinks she’s a sugar plum and a candy cane and doesn’t take anything she says or does seriously. I tried to counsel him. She wasn’t joking, I said. She was utterly unmoved by my beautiful Franconia.

Getting from Boston to Riga is another good example of what I mean. We did have to wait a long time. So what? The seats weren’t the most comfortable. So what? The food wasn’t as good as Burger King. But so what, and what is? We are on a three-week joyride together. To Europe! That’s amazing. During the Franconia snow-in, we were with our mom and Chloe’s mom. You know, to keep an eye on things. Make sure we didn’t get out of hand, and um, out of some things, and into other things. This time we’re motherless, and the girls still aren’t happy. Chloe keeps calling Riga her penance. I hope she is joking. And Hannah doesn’t care about anything but Barcelona. She also thinks we’re going to swing over to Paris for a few days. If I didn’t know that Hannah doesn’t have a humorous bone in her body, I’d swear she was joking. To explain why we couldn’t “swing over to Paris,” Blake tried to show her the map, to talk through the twenty-one days of our trip with her, every one accounted for, but she ignored him. To pay her back, Blake and I now ignore every mention of Paris. It’s like we can’t hear her. Every time she says Paris, we say, what? She says PARIS, and we say, what? She says Paris!!! We say, what?

I can’t tell you how much that annoys her and amuses us.

It’s warm in Riga, and the fields are pretty. Maine has more pine. Here, everywhere I look, the grass is uncut. The roads have no shoulders and no sidewalks. I’m sure when we get closer to the city, there will be sidewalks. Right? There have to be some sidewalks somewhere, no?

Hannah is an ice queen. I’d never say anything to my smitten brother. I know she’s beautiful and all. But my God. She’s sitting in a Latvian taxi, looking at her feet. She’s not even looking out the window. I say, Hannah, look, Riga.

And she says, so? It’s a city. I’ve seen cities before.

But you’ve never seen Riga, right?

The worst part is, she got Blake to sit in the middle because she said she wanted to sit next to a window, and now she’s not even looking out of it! If I was Blake, I’d be pissed. Heck, I’m pissed already, and I’m not even Blake.

At least Chloe loves stuff. Once she stops being anxious and, granted that’s easier for me to write than for her to do, but once she stops, she loves stuff. She loves going to the movies and to water parks, loves talking and fishing, and though I don’t like fishing, I like that she likes it. She loves skating and plays a mean four-player hockey game. And she’s a fast skater, too. Not as fast as Blake, but fast for a girl. I can buy her an ice cream or a burger, and she eats it with gusto. She likes driving, and she sings when she drives. She sings when she gardens, too. She never yells at other drivers. And she is so pretty. She doesn’t like people to think that, sometimes not even me. Says she doesn’t want me to objectify her, or some shit like that. I still like looking at her, and when she lets me, I like touching her. She’s got the silkiest hair of anybody I’ve ever met. And other soft nice things too. I wish she’d let me touch her more often. Sometimes it’s hard to get her alone. Ever since Dad’s truck broke, it’s been a bitch to get together just the two of us. Blake and Hannah somehow manage, because on top of everything else, I’m always at varsity. Poor Blake. He’s the most in-deep-trouble dude in Maine, because not only does he not know how unlucky he is, but he thinks he’s lucky.