SOMEWHERE IN THE DRIFT between sleep and waking, night and light, I heard a man call my name from far away, in a voice that meant I should come join him. It couldn’t be my husband—he was lying beside me. I thought it sounded like my father, long dead. And I was afraid, because I can rarely resist the lure of a trip.
My mother used to tell me it was not good to ride the down escalator. She kept the reason mysterious—whether a superstition, or maybe a bizarre moral stricture, or a past disaster, I could never quite make out. In any event, we shouldn’t take the risk. So in department stores we rode the escalator up and walked or took the elevator down. Later I learned it was something very personal she drew me into: simply that the down escalator made her dizzy and sick to her stomach. I never felt leery of escalators, nor of elevators in any ordinary, claustrophobic sense, but when I lived alone on the top floor of a tall building I feared, while going down to the basement, that the elevator would not stop there but continue down, down to a subterranean region of eerie, phantasmagoric happenings, just as when Don Quixote is lowered into the Cave of Montesinos and falls asleep, to meet long-dead creatures dwelling in “enchanted solitudes” and enacting floridly romantic adventures. Even going back up, in the instant’s pause between pushing the button and the elevator’s ascent, my heart and breath again hung suspended as I waited to be transported to the earth’s secret, exotic core, from which I too might wish never to return and might chide friends who hauled me up with ropes, for “robbing me of the sweetest existence and most delightful vision any human being ever enjoyed or beheld.” The car always went up. Gasping in relief, I would shift my visions accordingly, and imagine that instead of stopping at the top floor it would continue on through the roof and sail aloft like a balloon, past this world in which every single thing was a boundary, to a region of open, dazzling spaces without logic or limits.
My mother never wearied of telling the story of her trip to Watertown, New York, before I was born. She had a seductive way of telling a story, a way that ensnared me in the filaments of her emotions and made me impatient for the time when such worldly adventures would happen to me. It was towards the end of the Depression, on the eve of war in Europe. My father had been fortunate enough to find a government job in Watertown, something to do with taxes. She stayed behind with my sister in her parents’ house in Brooklyn, a brownstone with each floor given over to a daughter and her family. She seems to have considered it perfectly natural to stay behind with her parents, which is odd since in another part of her mind she believes a woman should go wherever her husband goes. Except, perhaps, to Watertown. My father would come into town every second or third weekend and on one of these visits he persuaded my mother to ride back part of the way with him, half an hour or so, no great risk, then he would drop her at a bus stop where she could catch a ride home. She gets into the car, leaving my sister in the care of the extended family, and after a time notices that they are out of the city, speeding along a highway. When she remarks on this, my father says he’ll let her out in a while. Pretty soon she realizes they are far from the safety of Brooklyn, headed for Watertown.
“He kidnapped me,” she would declare with pride and delight.
On the way to his rooming house, my father waved from the car window to a couple of his office mates passing on the street, and called out happily that his wife was paying him a visit. My mother found his landlady courteous enough, though a type she was not accustomed to—tight-lipped, chalky-faced, austere in a particular small-town fashion. While my father was off at work they chatted. Towards the close of the chat the landlady told my mother that she seemed to be a nice woman but that in Watertown nice women, though they might wear rouge and powder, did not wear lipstick. This amused my mother as a lesson in provinciality. Especially since as everyone in Brooklyn knew, lipstick was the most modest form of makeup, powder next, rouge next, mascara next, and eye shadow the ultimate. Eyeliner was not yet used.
On the second day in Watertown, it was arranged that my mother would go downtown to meet my father for lunch. She started walking along the road he had indicated. Soon a car slowed alongside her; the driver honked and called to her to get in. She ignored him. For quite a while he tracked her, occasionally blowing the horn, but, a city girl, she steadfastly ignored him.
When she got to the office she told my father about the man who had tried to pick her up, then they went to lunch. In the restaurant my father greeted some people and introduced her. Imagine her surprise when one, looking puzzled, said, “I saw your wife walking to town. I figured she was coming to meet you and I wanted to give her a lift, but she wouldn’t turn around.” One of the very men they had passed on the street the day before!
Of course my mother was embarrassed. He had meant well, but how was she to have known? How to explain that in New York City a sensible woman never gets into a passing car with a stranger?
I was conceived, legend has it, on the Watertown trip. Then my father brought her home to her parents’ house.
There was another trip my parents made early in their married life, before I was born, that my mother liked to tell about. The Thousand Islands, in Canada. Even though my mother described the Thousand Islands in vague terms—peaceful, small old-fashioned houses, lots of water—she managed, with her talent for narrative and her candid face and expressive voice, to make them sound highly exotic, and thus they remain, the very name thrilling in its magnificent profusion. There too she met a landlady, who told her—my mother is sociable with strangers—that she had never seen Jews before and always believed, as she had been taught, that Jews had horns. My mother informed her, no doubt in the winning, candid manner I know well, that Jews assuredly did not have horns. From my mother’s stories I sometimes confuse the two landladies, the horns and the lipstick, and the two trips—if indeed they were separate experiences: Watertown is very near the Thousand Islands, I have since learned. She talked about her travels so often, I imagine, because they were so infrequent. I don’t count the Catskill Mountains and Florida: those were not trips but transfers of the corporeal self in a car or an airplane in order to arrive at the same place but with better weather.
Before she was born, her parents traveled halfway round the world at great peril, and whether or not they told her about their travels, she, along with many in her generation, desired nothing more than to stay put where it was safe.
But I always yearned to go on exotic trips and nagged about it till at last, I must have been nine or ten, my mother said all right, we would go to the Thousand Islands. My outlook on life was transformed—I had something to live for beyond the asphyxiating routine of school—and I began making lists, secret lists that I kept hidden in a night-table drawer, of what I would take to the Thousand Islands: 2 pr. shorts, 2 bathing suits, 3 skirts (white w. belt, red print, pleated) ... Every night I revised the secret lists—for, unlike my mother, I thrived on secrecy—and copied them over, picturing myself in the various combinations of outfits, doing things on my secret agenda: ambling down foreign streets lined with picturesque cottages, or standing on a pier in the salt breeze, gazing over the rippling water dotted with hundreds of tiny gleaming islands. Sometimes I would ask my mother about the impending trip and she would retell her story about going there as a young woman, the landlady, the horns, and get a nostalgic look on her face which I interpreted as sweet longing and anticipation. But as weeks passed, her responses grew vaguer and then dismissive, till it dawned on me that there would be no Thousand Islands trip and I would never be packing the clothes on the lists. At first I thought the plans had fallen through for some adult reason, then with a kind of gradual shock I understood that there had never been any trip planned, she had said it only to placate me, to shut me up, as she did with five-minute spaghetti. When I was impatient for dinner she would sometimes tell me she was cooking a special type of spaghetti, five-minute spaghetti, and in fact those spaghetti meals did seem to materialize more quickly than most. Only when I was a teen-ager and began to go to supermarkets alone—for from as far back as I can remember, my mother shopped, pulling me along, in a tiny grocery with barely room to stand, where she had to ask the waddling grocer to fetch each item, one by one, which revelation of our family’s intimate tastes and needs seemed a violation of privacy—did I learn there was no such thing as five-minute spaghetti. I was mortified, not so much on account of having been duped, but to think that my hunger—evidently an urgent, abandoned, exposed, unseemly lust—required such strategies.
I forgot about my secret lists and when I found them a few years later, under a pile of new secret lists and agendas in the night-table drawer, I studied them with contempt—7 pr. socks, sneakers, white sndls.—and tore them up. There would come a time, I thought vengefully, when I could go to the Thousand Islands by myself, and not need to beg anyone to take me.
One summer afternoon I went on an excursion with a man I knew. I was going away soon on a long trip, and we wanted to spent one unfettered, leisurely afternoon together. He said he knew a place in the country, an old friend’s house on a lake; the friend was away. He picked me up on a street corner in his car—I knew him well, so it was all right to get in. But when we arrived we found the friend’s brother there. We were all very civilized and pretended this was not a tryst, and as we sat on the porch overlooking the lake, eating sandwiches and drinking iced tea, we discussed the troubled politics of the Middle East, where none of us had ever been. After a while the friend’s brother excused himself to do some paperwork inside and urged us to enjoy the lake and the house, to make ourselves at home. We swam and lay on the wooden dock in the hot sun, where he caressed my back, and just from that simple motion and from the absurdity of the situation we reached such a pitch of excitement that he wanted to make love then and there, but I couldn’t do that right in the middle of a lake with cottages around it, so we went inside to a downstairs bedroom, tearing off our wet suits recklessly and barely in time to fit ourselves together in some frenzied slapdash fashion. Later we told the friend’s brother, all of us with composed faces, that we had had a nice swim and a nap, thanked him, and drove back to the city to resume our workaday lives.
Some time later my husband went on a weekend camping trip that wasn’t really that, a trip he said he needed for solitude and an imprecise sort of spiritual refreshment which I, of all people, would not dream of challenging—nor of joining him on, not being a camper. He carefully, almost ostentatiously, unearthed supplies like hiking boots and a canteen. Months after, when I found out that the trip had not really been a camping trip—what could I, of all people, say? I would not have been altogether devastated, except for one thing. He had borrowed my knapsack for the trip. “Do you mind if I take your blue knapsack?” he asked, the night before he left, and I shrugged and said, “Sure.” That still rankles, that my knapsack was a witness, kidnapped, and on top of that he really didn’t need a knapsack (or a canteen) in the city. I don’t even like to think of why he did that, even less than I like to think of how mortified and disillusioned I was when I learned, after so many years, that there was no such thing as five-minute spaghetti. But these are earnest, candid people. It was probably nothing despicably complicated, just for verisimilitude, and again to placate me and any (nonexistent) anxiety or suspicion.
So I became a well-traveled person (though never to the Thousand Islands—I have lost that urge), but unlike my mother, I rarely entertain or lure with travel stories. Nor do I tell about the lists of things to take along the next time and the agendas of things to accomplish. I would never have done a thing like that, taking the knapsack. Not simply because I would not run such risks, fully as mysterious as the risk of the down escalator. But because secrecy has its own proprieties, utterly unknown to those earnest candid people who have to snare others in their travels, who cannot travel alone.