1952
After Mom died, Dad was uncomfortable in his new role as widower. He fumbled with how to tell people. “Ethel’s gone west,” he’d say. Not knowing the soldier’s expression, six-year-old Anna Louisa took it literally. After all, Mom had driven across the country, from coast to coast. After a while, Anna Louisa began to doubt that there’d really been a funeral. Maybe her memories were mixed up. Primroses, tears, a patch of shade beneath an acacia tree—those could be from anything. “She’s gone west,” Dad said, and Anna Louisa imagined her mom driving clear to California and never wanting to come back.
She was only a kid, but it was silly, really. All of the tears and handkerchiefs. The gilt-edged cards covered in lilies and indecipherable script. The black armband on her coat. The smell of primroses. She knew, she knew, but still she wondered. At every Saturday matinee, in between bites of Jujubes, she’d scan the faces on the screen. Maybe, just maybe, Mom wasn’t dead. She’d only gone west.
Even long after she was old enough to know better, long after Dad had sat her down and explained all about radium moving into Mom’s bones and causing a ruckus, she still watched those movies every Saturday afternoon.
It was maybe because of this, because of the lingering hopefulness of a girl refusing to accept disappointment, that Louise half-expected to see her mom when she arrived in L.A. in 1938. She didn’t even realize she was half-expecting it, but she stepped from the bus scanning the crowd.
Of course, Mom wasn’t there. Primroses.
As she drives along Route 66, she realizes that that bus ride fourteen years ago probably went along this exact road. It probably passed through Arizona and Oklahoma and the endless middle of Missouri. Looking at the expanse of Illinois and Indiana and Ohio on her map, she begins to wonder if Missouri is the worst the country has to offer.
That was the last time she took a bus. In her days as an extra, she couldn’t afford more than her own two feet. Then came studio cars. And then—she pats the tawny dashboard of the Champ—a car of her own.
Mom wasn’t waiting in Los Angeles for her when she first stepped off that bus, still Anna Louisa Wild, but, she remembers now, Florence Daniels was.
Of course, she didn’t know who Florence Daniels was at the time. Just that, as she stood on the platform, suitcase in hand, a tall woman stepped from the crowd. The woman had reddish-blond hair and wore wide trousers, like Katharine Hepburn.
“Looking for someone?” she asked.
That was when Anna Louisa realized she’d been thinking of Mom, and her face got warm. “She’s not here.”
“Ah,” the woman said with something soft in her expression. She had pale lashes and very blue eyes. “Need a stand-in?”
Though the question made more sense now, it was strange then, coming from this tall stranger. Anna Louisa fumbled with her suitcase. She was eighteen and alone.
The woman noticed, and smiled. “Can I point you in the direction of a cab? You look as bewildered as a newborn kitten.”
Nobody had ever compared Anna Louisa to a newborn kitten. A filly, sometimes. Or a mule. Once, a wolf. But a kitten was something she couldn’t bear. She straightened her shoulders. She remembered that she’d done her hair like Loretta Young, and the curls were still holding. She was ready for Hollywood.
“I’m fine, but thank you. I’ll get my bearings.”
There was still that little wisp of a smile on the woman’s face. “I believe you will. This town isn’t going to eat you up.”
Suddenly Anna Louisa felt more tiger than kitten.
“But if you ever need a stand-in for whoever was supposed to come meet you, well, look me up.” The woman let go of her handbag and offered her hand, like a man. “Florence Daniels. I’m at MGM. Screenwriting.”
If Anna Louisa had known how this business worked, she would’ve taken both the hand and the connection. But she was young and green enough to think she could make it in Hollywood through talent and sheer force of will. So, while she took the older woman’s hand, she merely said, “I’m…Louise. And I really should find a cab.”
Florence Daniels didn’t wear gloves. Her handshake was firm. The newly christened Louise wasn’t even sure she was shaking hands correctly.
“Well, Louise,” the other woman said. The name sounded somehow right when she said it. “Good luck to you.”
Maybe it was the new name, maybe the unexpected greeting, maybe the assurance that she wouldn’t be devoured by the movie machine, but with that wish of luck, Louise didn’t feel so alone anymore.
“Thank you.”
With a squeeze of her hand, Florence Daniels let go and disappeared into the crowd at the bus station.
As Louise passes out of Missouri, she realizes that she’d left that battered copy of The Grapes of Wrath back in Rolla. She’d been reading it every night since pinching it from the ranch. Flipping the pages, she could almost smell the ink and paste and paper of the Wilshire library. It was like catching up with old friends.
In St. Louis, she stops at a bookstore to buy another copy. She’s gotten used to falling asleep with the book in hand. It makes the nights fractionally less lonely. Right on the bookstore’s shelf by The Grapes of Wrath is Steinbeck’s newest, East of Eden. Impulsively, she buys both.
She’s not quite sure why she does. Maybe it’s because she was halfway through The Grapes of Wrath and doesn’t remember what happens after Tom shoots the deputy. Maybe it’s because it’s been years since she’s bought a new book. The last, she recalls suddenly, was Pearl Buck’s Peony. Maybe it’s because the only thing she’s bought impulsively in the last week has been yet another hamburger.
At St. Louis, she also turns off Route 66. On the map, it veers north, toward Chicago. Instead she takes Route 40 into Illinois. The lip liner makes a straighter line across to New Jersey.
The man at the Sunoco station filling up her car says it used to be the National Old Trails Road. “That was back before there were any highways, you know.” He speaks conversationally, hat pushed back on graying curls. Louise gets the impression that he doesn’t find many conversational partners in this brown corner of Illinois. “Wasn’t even paved. Back then, it was just man, his Model T, and the open road.”
Man, or woman, Louise thinks, pulling back onto the road. Maybe two women with a camera and a pair of makeshift journals.
Though East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath ride on the passenger seat, she’s no longer in Steinbeck country. Sure, there are still turtles and dust and downtrodden farmers, but who writes about them? There are no great novelists capturing the Midwest, in all its dubious glory. No masterpieces celebrating Ohio or Illinois. At least none that she can think of. But as she winds along Route 40, past neat farms and main streets dotted with redbrick drugstores and overstuffed feed stores, she wonders why not. There’s something peaceful about these rural highways and cornfields eager for spring’s arrival. She would read those books.
As she crosses into Indiana, it begins to snow.
For a while now, she’s been passing white-dusted trees and brown fields marked with snow-lined furrows. Evidence of December, with no active precipitation. But she passes over the invisible border between the states and it’s as if the sky suddenly has permission to let loose—with snow, first drifting in front of her headlights, then speckled on the windshield, then ghosting across the road in swirls of white.
She’s watching the snowflakes, and so she doesn’t see the deer step out onto the road.
At first she doesn’t know what it is. A smudge of brown up ahead in the middle of all that white. A smudge of brown resolutely standing directly in her way. When it doesn’t move, Louise swears and jerks the wheel to the right. Tires squeal and she slides off onto the shoulder.
It’s a deer. Not a big one or a particularly decisive one. It stands in the driving snow, staring at her through the side window and not budging an inch. Far enough into the road to be a nuisance, but not far enough along to finish crossing to the other side.
The deer stands, unconcerned, but Louise’s heart is pounding. The Champ has slid to a stop just a foot or two from a tree. Apart from her antlered friend, the road is deserted. If she’d smacked into the tree…She finally unpeels her hands from the steering wheel. They’re freezing cold. When she reaches across for her purse, which is now on the floor, the silly deer finally decides to go on his way.
The snow isn’t deep and the shoulder is relatively flat, but it’s icy enough that her wheels do nothing but uselessly spin. She needs a tow truck or a strong pair of shoulders or something to get her out of this mess.
She slips her feet from her shoes and rubs her toes. The car is already getting cold. The wind whistles around the edges of the door. Maybe she should stay put. Tuck up her feet and read until someone like Duane stops to lend a hand. After all, she’s not dressed for this. She’s in heels and a three-thousand-dollar coat.
But no one’s coming, she knows that. No leading man with snow tires and excellent timing. She can’t stay forever on the side of this road. The next visitor could be a bear. Are there bears in Indiana? She can’t say for sure that there aren’t.
She puts her shoes back on, buttons her coat, and pushes open the door.
It’s cold out. Wind nips inside the collar of her mink coat. The deer has left footprints across the road, but the tracks from her car are quickly disappearing. Snowflakes catch on her eyelashes. She hasn’t seen snow since she left New Jersey. She’d forgotten how soft it is, how quiet, how quickly it melts on cheeks and noses. She’s left her little veiled half-hat in the car and her hair is already damp. She tips her head back and catches a snowflake on her tongue. In this snowstorm in the middle of the country, she’s six years old again.
She goes around to the front of the car and gives an experimental shove, but the car doesn’t budge. She tries to get a shoulder under it. She braces against the tree and pushes with her back. She hauls off and gives it a kick. Nothing.
She stands, ankle deep in snow, staring at the red hood, until she remembers that she’d put the parking brake on.
That impediment solved, she again takes up her position in front of the car. This time, it rocks when she pushes it. It almost moves.
She’s spent the past decade and a half dancing. When she first got to Hollywood, tap classes, every day, until she could shuffle-ball-change with the best of them. Later, days spent in the mirror-lined dance studio, rehearsing new numbers until her calves ached. Takes and retakes where she waltzed and tangoed, rode and swam, smiled and sang. She knows “strong.”
She sets her feet at the base of the tree and pushes again. Pushes for all of the times she was told to sit back and let someone else do it. Pushes for all of the times she was told to not hurt herself or break a nail or work up a sweat. She’s sweated. And she’s done it in heels.
Inch by inch, the Champ rolls back out to the road. Her shoes are full of snow and her gloves are soaked, but she doesn’t stop. Snowflakes speckle the hood. When the car reaches the road, she shouts and doesn’t care if the bears hear her.
She reaches through the passenger door to reengage the parking brake, but doesn’t get in just yet. In her three-thousand-dollar coat, she lies down and makes the best snow angel she’s ever made.
The snow makes driving slower, but Louise isn’t tired. Maybe it’s the Snickers bar she bought at her last stop, maybe it’s the snow still melting in her shoes, maybe it’s the reminder that she’s more than just smiles and ukuleles. She briefly contemplates driving all night. Teamsters do it.
She stops once for a turkey sandwich and once more for a cup of coffee. When it starts to snow again, she opens the window and invites a wave of snowflakes into the car.
By the time the yawns catch up with her, she’s halfway across Ohio. The snow is coming faster and she finds a cheap motel with a packed parking lot. She’s not the only one looking to wait out the storm.
She drapes her mink over the backs of two chairs to dry and pours herself a whiskey. Rather than venture out to the front desk with her ice bucket, she breaks an icicle from right outside and drops the entire thing in her glass. She settles in bed with drink, book, and snow outside her window.
East of Eden is full of grand characters, some dreadful, some heartrending, some unnecessarily righteous. They hate and they love in great measure. She bites her thumb as she reads, waiting for them to fight against fate, to reach for hope and freedom.
One character, Lee, mentions the Hebrew word timshel, often translated in the Bible as “thou shalt.” God casts Cain out of Eden with the command that he shall prevail over sin. But timshel, says Lee, more rightly means “thou mayest”—not a command, but a choice. Cain can prevail over sin, but it’s in his own hands. The other characters blindly follow what they think are preordained paths. But if timshel means “thou mayest” and they hold the opportunity to decide and choose and transform, well, then that changes the whole story.
She keeps flipping pages until she looks up and sees that it’s midnight and the ice in her whiskey has melted. She used to read before bed every night. She and Arnie, tucked close to each other, sharing the light of the single bedside lamp. Even when they could afford a second lamp, they still read shoulder-to-shoulder at night.
Louise used to laugh at that. She used to tease Arnie, “See how we’re stuck?” These days she thinks that more and more, only now they’re stuck on opposite sides of the bed. Now they’re stuck in the dark, stuck in the silence, stuck in the stubbornness of inaction. Once, after he first came home, he called his wheelchair his prison. She didn’t know what hers was. The studio? Her marriage?
But as she lies here on a hotel bed, cradling a book and a whiskey with a swirl of melted icicle, she wonders if the prisons ever really existed. She’d never pushed a car, because she’d been told she wasn’t strong enough. Never taken a dramatic role, because she wasn’t good enough. Never told Arn how much she’d missed him, because she wasn’t brave enough. Thou shalt fail.
She sets the whiskey down on the nightstand and lets it grow warm. She licks a finger and draws it across the middle of the page. “Thou mayest,” she reads aloud, realizing as she does so that, like the book’s characters, following “thou shalt” unwaveringly, she needs a new translation. That few things in her life are etched in absolutes. That she may fail or she may not. That the script is hers to write.