To Provo. Past the Seagulls in White Suits

I-15 Southbound

 

Becca turned right onto I-15 and the city of Draper faded behind them. She wound around Point of the Mountain—a large isthmus of land, a hill really, that wedged out of the Wasatch Mountains and into the Salt Lake Valley—and passed Thanksgiving Point. They stopped for an early lunch in Lehi at In-N-Out. They parked, grabbed some trash to throw out, Analise sucking her binky, and walked across the parking lot to the entrance of the white building with the California Spanish tile roof on top, the classic red and yellow fifties-era signage marking one of their favorite fast food restaurants.

Once inside, Lee did a double take. The booths, tables, and line in front of him were occupied almost entirely by young men and women nicely dressed in black and white suits and full-length dresses, scattered and picking at their food like seagulls. Mormons. A lot of them. And, as if in a scene from a movie, they all looked up at him, Becca, and Analise as they entered. They stared for a second, then went back to eating their food. Perhaps it was the sight of Lee with his tattoos and dark skin, Becca with her hair in near dreadlocks. Both of them with grungy camping clothes, carrying a sweet baby. It was a strange experience, standing in that line in In-N-Out. In his bad years, middle school mostly, Lee had endured taunts of Mexican and African American slurs despite being more or less in the majority at East High, but these days, at the university, it was rare for him to feel out of place. He had an Iraqi professor and Pakistani colleague for friends. Lee had forgotten just how white, suburban, and Mormon Utah could be.

They ordered food. Lee—a double-double, fries, and chocolate shake. Becca—a cheeseburger, fries (animal style), and a Diet Coke. They sat down among the seagulls, some of the younger ones staring for longer than was probably polite.

After lunch, Becca continued driving the rest of the way to Provo. She could see Utah Lake in front of her—blueish-green and pale in the September clouds. Mount Timpanogos to her left, its large flat-top outline, one of Utah’s highest peaks. The yellow-brown grass blanketing the area in between. The headquarters of several MLMs bordering the freeway. She listened to sad indie music and felt comfort in her melancholy.

“We’re making such short drives,” said Becca after a while to Lee. “We drive for an hour and then we stop. I want to see my mom, but it’s Wednesday already and Saturday is the wedding. I want to be in the desert already! I mean, it shouldn’t take this long to drive to Zion, it’s only eight hours away.” They had decided to keep driving south, to the desert to go camping (and perhaps even go to Zachariah’s wedding). They were both restless and couldn’t imagine staying at any of their families for more than a night or two.

She looked over at Lee, who she assumed was still awake, but was surprisingly fast asleep with his cheek pressed firmly against the lightly tinted window. She shrugged.

Becca couldn’t wait to get to the place where everything was sparse and austere, isolated and soothing and almost desperately beautiful in a way that many other geographical climates were not. The place? The desert! Of course.

Becca smiled at Lee asleep and looked in the rearview mirror to see Analise, also smiling, while she also held her small teething giraffe. All of a sudden, she felt a joy she could not explain and in a rare moment, something she had experienced perhaps but once before, felt a sweeping, luminous desire descend over her to become a better person. A better mom, a better wife. Utter love, swooning, for Analise.

She had it so good, she thought. So why did she exhibit such self-destructive tendencies or lapse into such morose self-pity? Becca wanted to sell all of their possessions and move to Haiti, spend her time working as a nurse in a clinic, or for an NGO, doing something, anything, of value besides living for herself in America with all her first-world problems.

Becca spent the next hour thinking of places she, Lee, and Analise could move to—Haiti, Central America, South America, Africa, India—someplace where the concerns of life were more visceral, real, and meaningful. Less self-absorbed. Less Instagram and Facebook. Less conversations about where you were going to send your kid to preschool—preschool apparently the topic of conversation whenever she talked to another mom with a kid the same age, besides the fact that preschool was another four years away.

Becca wished she and Lee had the luxury or influence (or lack of child) to do something like #vanlife, but felt visibly sick envisioning herself in bikini bottoms staring out over the Grand Canyon in the back of a vintage van, thinking of some clever hashtag to post with the photo later on in the evening on Instagram.

At three, Becca pulled into the driveway of her former home, which her mom now lived in all alone. Each time she thought of her mom, by herself in that grey Victorian house with the big front porch, she nearly lost it. The house must reverberate and echo so loudly with only one lone soul walking across the creaky hardwood floors. Becca envisioned each step her mom made in that house, each step probably a tiny reminder to her mom that it was her steps and hers alone that were the ones bouncing lonely acoustics through the cavernous and empty downstairs.

Becca pulled into the driveway and parked. Lee took out Analise. The two of them unloaded their possessions into the house, put Analise down in the Pack ‘n’ Play in the spare bedroom upstairs, and promptly fell asleep on the couch downstairs, waiting for Rebecca to get home from work.

Ever since Analise was born, they’d learned to sleep when they could get it. To cram in sleep like the thin nooks of space mice use to creep into houses.

For nearly six months, Becca felt jet lagged and haggard, her head slightly warm and loose, her body thin and light, heavy and pressed, as when one stretches beyond and through exhaustion during flight travel, through hours of different time zones and sleep cycles. But somehow she and Lee managed. They both summoned an inner parental strength neither felt possible, then collapsed when it was no longer needed.