We speak in years instead of days.
I remember driving back from Wisconsin. We’d gone on a college visit to UW-Madison. The information session was bland, and the campus was far too hilly for my mom’s legs, which were constricted by a too-tight pair of jeans she insisted on wearing, but the proximity of campus to a lake was nice. After the visit we drove to the Dells and walked around, dallying in and out of t-shirt printing shops, moccasin stores, taffy stands. We ate dinner at Buffalo Phil’s, a kitschy establishment with a faux wood cabin exterior and food delivered on miniature trains. I wonder what happens when a train breaks down. I suppose the fries get cold.
We were driving back from Wisconsin — Exhausted Mom, my brothers, and myself (the college visit was my own) — because I knew better than Exhausted Mom to spend money we didn’t really have on a hotel. To her, the trip to Wisconsin was just that: a trip, and it deserved at least one night spent as a stranger among the people. To me, she’d lost the right to make decisions several years before, and this trip would not see the restoration of that right. In that tension we proceeded through all things like a set of clamped eyelids, inextricably linked and racked by headaches.
I volunteered to make the drive through the night myself, arguing we could not spare the $129 a hotel room would cost us. This was valid, said Exhausted Mom, except we were always short $129 so why not be short $129 for a good reason — just once? No, I said. That won’t do.
The streetlamps strung along Highway 151 sprinted by in white streaks. I ignored them as I watched for deer laying claim to the pavement. When we stopped at a 24-hour McDonald’s in Dubuque for coffee, an exoskeleton blanket of mayflies had layered the drive-thru window so completely that it was out of service. We squirmed through the similarly may-flied door to go order in the lobby, where a handful of the most anarchic mayflies had busted in and were harassing the registers with a buzzy, slurred speech.
The remarkable thing about the drive, though, was —
I remember driving back from Wisconsin. We’d gone on a college visit to UW-Madison. The information session was bland, the campus was too hilly, and my mom, Exhausted Mom, had on a pair of jeans that were awfully tight. The breeze off the lake near the school was nice, though we heard it nips like hell in the winter. After the visit we ate dinner at Buffalo Phil’s, a kitschy place with a faux wood cabin look to the outside and miniature trains inside that run your food and drink to the table. I wonder how that works. I bet it’s a pain in the ass to maintain.
We were driving back from Wisconsin — Exhausted Mom, my brothers, and myself. (The college visit was my own. Not much came of it.) We were driving back because I knew better than Exhausted Mom to spend money we didn’t have on a hotel. This was a bummer to her, because the trip to Wisconsin was just that — a trip, and it deserved at least one night spent as a stranger among the people. To me, she’d forfeited her right to make decisions when she developed a nasty addiction to materialism, and I was to be the executor of our family’s fiscal survival. In that tension we proceeded through all things, our horns inextricably locked.
We traded shifts through the night, though I drove the largest portion of the run, starting just north of Dubuque and putting the van in park at grandma’s house in Des Moines, which was where we’d all lived for a year by then, at about five a.m. When we stopped for gas near Coralville, I looked over to see Exhausted Mom had fallen asleep, her cheek sunk awkwardly into the seatbelt. It was the most human I’d felt about her in years; she looked like a tuckered-out toddler slumped open-mouth in their car seat.
The remarkable thing about the drive, though, was how dead-quiet it was. An hour from town I killed the remaining five or six bits of radio volume and let the whir of tires spill into the fields with the headlights and Exhausted Mom’s light snoring. A cacophony, a peace: and when we neared the faint, star-drowning light of suburban sprawl —
I remember driving back from Wisconsin.
The college visit to UW-Madison had been fine — just fine, nothing remarkable. The amount of hills around campus must bear some responsibility for the swanky, fit-figured jocks and bookish pre-med scholars dithering about, but one day of hills could not impress my tight-jeaned mother. She was Exhausted by the end of it.
We drove to the Dells for the afternoon and evening, grubbing up dinner at a kitschy joint called Buffalo Bill’s. As if anyone knows who Buffalo Bill really was; I’d look him up, but like most everyone else, I don’t really care. There were miniature trains that tracked around the place to deliver food and drink. They were as close to cool as Bill probably was, their half-hearted whistles recalling a faint-hearted image or two from my childhood play room, where I used to build thirty-three layouts a day of wooden tracks and railway towns for Thomas and Friends to explore. Tubs and tubs of track pieces, and yet I was always short one more bumper or bridge piece. I cost my parents a pretty penny.
See, I’d rather lick up the taffy stands, shitty t-shirt shops, and moccasin stores that are collecting grime in a damp backwash of my memory. If I remember right, my brothers bought a pair each of Minnetonka moccasins, and my mother — well, I bet she spent an hour looking at costume jewelry. I can’t remember if that’s exactly what she did, but she used to buy costume jewelry all the time to fill a patchwork of voids in her head and neck and chest — deep in the chest, in the Beating Region, which was almost as kitschy as Buffalo Bill’s. She couldn’t have known the plastic mineral gems and gaudy lattice-work would be so counterproductive.
It was getting dark and progressively later, and my mom — our mom, an Exhausted Mom — wanted to get a hotel room. This was supposed to be a trip, anyway, and for her it was the nearest thing to one she’d had in years. But she — as evidenced by full carts of groceries at Wal-Mart, unpaid for and left to thaw— was bad with money, so I stepped in. No, I said, we did not need to spend that $130; I’d drive all night if it meant we avoided it. She could have easily argued that at least that $130 possessed the virtue of a “family trip.” But she didn’t put up much of a fight; we all buckled in, slumped in the aching leather which was never as olive in color as the pictures in the 2006 Honda Odyssey brochure had suggested, and shared an awkward, low-volume-radio ride home, my eyes panning back-and-forth in a bloodshot scan for deer. Exhausted Mom snored lightly into the dirt stains of her seatbelt.
It wasn’t all so plain and frustrating. There was a moment of the drive —
No, that’s a lie. It was a plain and frustrating drive. Wasn’t it?
No, I was right the first time— it was kind of nice, Mom slumped all child-like. My brothers, too. Right?
I remember driving back from Wisconsin. I’d vetoed the idea of a hotel — wait.
I remember driving back from Wisconsin. This much is true.
Oh God.
Wait — I can’t remember. I’m not sure. What’s this blurred reel of film flickering on the wall — a hotel back door, a dim, red-lit after hours entry and a pizza box?
I can’t remember. Don’t deem me a liar, but I can’t remember. Oh God.
Why can’t I remember?
Author’s note: My mother, Angela Denise Stark/Eubanks, passed away September 29, 2016 after a long battle with mental health and its associated spirals. She was 49 years old.
