Interesting Women by Andrea Lee (7 ebook reader txt) 📗

in a gold car that’s not one of those niggerish Cadillacs or Lincolns, but a Rambler, begotten by American Motors. Discreet luxury, one of the new metallic paint jobs, and a padded dash. Praise the Lord, as my mother would say, we are rolling towards the Pacific in a sort of temple, elect, protected under the signs of American Motors and AAA. Safe, as usual. Safe.

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CENE II

(Along the southern edge of Lake Superior, between Sault Sainte Marie and Ironwood, Michigan. About three in the afternoon of the third day. Beyond fields and woods come occasional glimpses of the lake in dry brilliant sunshine. MAUD HARMON in the backseat opens her mouth into the air rushing in from the front, and lets the wind dry her tongue.)

MAUD: A good thing about this trip is the bottle caps. Coca-Cola is having a contest in honor of the World’s Fair and what they do is print a picture of a different city of the world in each bottle cap, you just peel up the cork, and there it is: Bangkok, Paris, Amsterdam. Whenever we stop at a gas station, I dash over to the Coke machine and worm my hand into the hole where the caps drop down after people open their Cokes. I’m lucky I have skinny hands. I have dozens of bottle caps now, my pockets rattle. I have all the countries now except Brazil and Denmark; they didn’t print any of Russia because they’re Communists. It’s for a contest, but I don’t think about that, I just like having all those cities. I like things that make you think about anything far away, whether it’s other countries or millions of years ago. Among the books I brought with me is one about Marco Polo and another about digging up fossil men in Africa. Another is Ivanhoe. Sometimes I dream that I’m flying over the heads of my mother and father and brothers, gone somewhere else. They’re sad but I’m not.

There was a big storm last night, which was our second night away from home. We were in a town called Mackinaw, which is a name that reminds me of old fish and worn-out raincoats, in a white little house that was part of a sort of motel near Lake Huron where the floor, if the three of us kids stood in one place, caved in about five inches, and where we had to wash the plates in the kitchen part before we ate dinner. Mom fixed minute steaks and corn on the cob and sliced tomatoes and the wind howled like a ghost story and the house shook like a giant was slapping it back and forth and I was disappointed that the roof didn’t blow off.

In the morning I went outside before anybody else and met a white boy on the shore of the lake, where the waves were slamming down like ocean waves. This boy came out of the bushes and he had a long green man’s jacket that came down over his spindly legs like toothpicks, and hair cut so short it looked like a smudge on his head. He said his name was Spencer and that his dad owned land beside the lake and then asked like a retard was I a Negro. I said no I was a Polish Chink from Bessarabia, which was a joke I got from my oldest brother, Michael, and then I told him we were going to the World’s Fair, and that’s our car I said, that new gold one. It was funny to be talking to a white boy in the summer, I’m used to them at school, but we don’t see each other after school or in vacations. This Spencer was quiet for a minute and said he’d show me something, and then he showed me that almost all the rocks on the shore had fossils in them, shells and sponges and trilobites. I picked up about fifteen fossils until my mother called me to come in and get my hair braided, and then it was time to eat breakfast and drive off in our golden chariot and leave old Spencer there waving like a little white doll in the middle of all of his million-year-old shells. See you later, alligator, I said. I felt sorry for him, stuck there while we set off to see the world.

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CENE III

(Bemidji, Minnesota. RICHARD HARMON stands at the foot of the giant statue of Paul Bunyan and his blue ox, Babe. Sixth day, about eleven in the morning. In the distance, paddleboats on Lake Bemidji.)

RICHIE: Well, eighth grade history was good for something. The Mississippi starts here. At least I think it does. This would be a great home movie, but this cheap family doesn’t even own a movie camera. Our friends do, but not us. Our mother says it’s more educational to look than to take pictures, so we’re traveling with the oldest Kodak in the USA, and we get to take a few crummy slides. On the Wonderful World of Color, people in the commercials are always filming each other in front of Pikes Peak or the Golden Gate Bridge. And what are we doing? We’re not even modern. In exactly eight years, when I’m finished with high school and college, I’m going to be a famous photographer and I’ll have the best equipment there is.

I buy photo magazines to check up on the new cameras, and because they’re good for nudes. Every issue you get has two or three good ones. All the girls in the photo pix are white, the way all the girls in Playboy are, the way everybody is, everywhere in the movies, on TV, in everything we watch or read. I know five or six really cute Negro girls from school or those pathetic Jack and Jill parties, girls so fine I’m half scared to ask them to dance or to say anything to them, but somehow they don’t seem as real as the