It was your idea to go to Georgia over spring break. You’ve never been to the South, not properly, and you’re writing a story about Juliette Gordon Low and her house in Savannah. It’s a twelve-hour drive, a sneeze. Plus, it’s March, and freezing, and it’s been a long winter. You want some sun. So you ask her if she’d like to come with you. She says yes. You buy new underwear at the mall.
She gets behind the wheel of your car, and you leave Iowa before the sun rises. You fall asleep almost immediately and when you wake it is snowing and she is speeding. You sit up, pick crust from the edges of your eyes. Road signs indicate that the lane is ending and she has to merge; she makes her move too late and hits a pothole at a diagonal. The tire blows.
You are somewhere outside St. Louis. She pulls over; you call AAA. They come and put on the spare, and the guy recommends a place down the road to get a new tire. You do as he suggests, and when it’s done she takes the wheel again, but within a few miles back on the highway the new tire is flat too. You pull into a repair shop exclusively for eighteen-wheelers; there is something hysterical about your tiny Hyundai with all its liberal bumper stickers sitting among those behemoths. It is the early months of 2011; marriage equality is smoldering, catching fire in some states, doused with water in others. The Justice Department says it will no longer enforce the Defense of Marriage Act. Things are happening.
As the two of you sit there, you start crying. You are embarrassed that your car has failed you so early in your journey. She apologizes, says it was her fault, and you tell her it wasn’t. “It’s not a great car,” you say, by way of explanation.
She laughs. “I guess this is part of the adventure. And we haven’t even gotten there yet!”
The mechanic seems to notice the two of you—that is to say, he notices your unbearable levels of queerness, the proximity of your bodies, the constellation formed by those details and the bumper stickers and, maybe, he just has a sixth sense—but he doesn’t say anything, for which you are grateful. He explains that the tire that was sold to you is full of huge, unpatchable holes. He’d put on a new one, but your car takes strange, specific tires in an uncommon size, and you’ll have to go to a bigger city to find them. He puts the spare back on. This time, you drive. Somewhere in Illinois, you get a tire that fits.
When you pull into the parking space outside the hotel, she leans over and kisses you. She kisses your top lip, then the lower one, like each one deserves its own tender attention. She leans away and looks at you with the kind of slow, reverent consideration you’d give to a painting. She strokes the soft inside of your wrist. You feel your heart beating somewhere far away, as if it’s behind glass.
“I can’t believe that you’ve chosen me,” she says.
In the room, she takes off your new underwear and buries her face between your thighs.
Savannah is warm and fragrant. The trees drip with Spanish moss, and the water in the fountains is dyed green for St. Patrick’s Day. The Juliette Gordon Low house is a beautiful, rambling mansion crowded with antiques. Underneath the “Juliette Gordon Low Birthplace” sign that hangs over the entrance, she eggs you on into increasingly ridiculous poses; you are both giggling when you go inside. The ancient women staffing it, who are all wearing drag-queen lipstick and eye shadow, respond to your excited pronouncements about your love of Girl Scouting with silence.
The tour is fascinating. Juliette, you think, sounds like a big dyke. The guide describes how she was constantly dissatisfied with her home—the furniture, the gate outside—so she just took on their design and modifications herself. She learned to smith metal. Why is it that badass women who don’t follow the rules always sound like lesbians to you? A psychiatrist would have a field day with that realization. (Though, in your defense, there is a portrait of her in a button-down top and with a hat like a park ranger’s and looking butch as hell hanging on the wall.)
Afterward, the two of you walk through an old cemetery. She kisses you behind a mausoleum. She tries to get you to fuck her there, and you don’t want to out of respect for the dead, but she is so beautiful. Then an employee shows up and you rearrange yourselves quickly and leave, laughing.
You drive to Tybee Island and order a platter of seafood—twisting open crayfish and swallowing scallops, eating nothing but the fruit of the sea. It is just mouthfuls of butter and water and salt and muscle. After the meal, you go to the beach and wade into the water. You see dolphins.
Every so often, her phone rings, and she smiles and walks some distance away to tell Val about the trip. Even as she shrinks with distance, she waves at you.
On your last day in town, a drunk man accosts you on the street. You are holding her hand when he comes up and grabs you. She shouts, “Let her go!” and does a martial arts move on his arm. He backs off in surprise, telling you to both go fuck yourselves, and staggers away.
You tremble for the better part of the next hour. As you walk back to the car, she keeps apologizing for not intervening sooner.
“Sooner than immediately?” you ask.
“I saw him coming from a mile off. I saw what he was going to do,” she says. “I know this is new to you, but I’ve dated a lot of women. This is just par for the course. This is the risk you’re taking.”
The drive home is wild, almost tweaked. You cover half the country—North Carolina to Chicago—in one day like fucking maniacs. You could, you think, drive forever and ever with her at your side.