Wayback

We are driving to Big Bear Mountain because my father is an engineer at Rocketdyne and says he wants to celebrate the moon landing. Except that we take this same trip every year so it doesn’t really feel like a celebration. Big Bear is only two hours away, but we’ve been stuck inside our station wagon most of the day. Everyone is hungry, cranky, tired. My parents grumble at the winding road while the kids fight from the bench seat. There is nothing to look at besides sky and fir trees. As the eldest and only girl, I supervise Basil, Cary, and the baby, who is dead and smells like diarrhea. It has charred wood skin and green moss where its eyes should be. My mother has brushed its hair so much that what’s left is troll-doll frizzy. Sometimes we think the baby is a girl and sometimes we think it’s a boy with its thing rotted off. We don’t know its name or age. Whenever we ask, our mother washes our mouths with Ivory soap. She loves using soap and telling us we’ll be sorry when our father gets home. Basil, the middle child, is the troublemaker, so he’s the sorriest.

I’m squished behind my father, who is driving. The back seat would be big enough for three except the baby is propped inside a carrier my father made from broken lawn chairs. We have to be careful not to lean against the baby or something might snap off and we’ll get in trouble. The baby’s arms and legs will grow back, so no harm done, but Basil will be punished. 

My father speeds up when the road straightens and brakes at the beginning of each new curve. He’s usually careful to follow most rules because not following rules can get you killed, but the road makes its own rules, so my father is a complete maniac in the car. I stare straight ahead to stop the world from swirling the way it does when I ride the Disneyland teacups. 

When we started this vacation, the carrier was in the wayback. The baby can’t get carsick and doesn’t need to face front. But five minutes ago, Basil got angry when our mother said we couldn’t stop to eat a snack. He punched the baby’s head with his 8-Ball hard enough that a big chunk of ear broke off and fell into my lap. I flailed and my elbow caught the baby in its ribs and knocked a hole in its chest. I screamed. Cary screamed. Basil laughed. The baby smelled so bad Cary barfed out the window. Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse, my mother told Basil he wouldn’t get dinner. 

“You’re such a Nazi!” he responded.

My father pulled over and said, “I’ve had it!” He made Basil stand by the wayback while he tore a rag into three strips and used them to wipe down the door, gag Basil, and tie Basil’s hands together. He stuck the baby between Cary and me and lifted Basil into the wayback. My father swallowed medicine to calm his heart, started the car, and said, “Let’s go.” 

Calling our mother a Nazi is the worst thing anyone can say. I’m hoping she doesn’t go into one of her trances where we can see her but she can’t see us. Before she has time to disappear inside herself, a hawk flies into the windshield, breaks its neck, and lands on the front hood. My father swerves, trying to shake it off. 

My mother screams, “Careful, Manfred!”

“That hawk flew into me,” my father says.

“Watch the road,” my mother says.

“I’m watching. You think the car drives itself, like at Disneyland?” says my father. 

“Are hawks friendly?” Cary asks. He has temporarily inherited Basil’s 8-Ball. He pretends to read the lines. “My sores say no,” Cary says.

“You can’t answer the questions yourself,” I say. 

“Why?” Cary asks.

“It’s not a real question if you know the answer,” I say. 

“But why?” 

“Don’t be stupid,” I say. 

“Be nice to your brother,” says my father, which seems strange, considering. Meanwhile, a dead hawk is baking on our front hood. 

When we packed for this trip, my mother reminded me how my grandmother was killed just before my mother turned thirteen. I got an early birthday present: a green canvas duffel bag big enough for everything I’d need if we had to abandon our home. She made me bring the duffel on this trip, which turned out to be a good thing since Basil is now using it for a pillow. 

“I feel sick,” says my mother. She unrolls the window about an inch, takes rapid, shallow breaths. 

Wind blows the baby’s hair against my cheek. “Gross!” I yell. 

Basil kicks the back of my seat.

Cary cracks up.

My mother seals the window shut, glares from the rearview mirror. 

“How much longer?” Basil whispers from the wayback. 

I turn around. He’s worked the gag off with his tongue. 

“Knock knock,” Basil says.

“Who’s there?” Cary asks.

“Orange.”

“Orange who?”

“Knock knock,” Basil says.

“Who’s there?” Cary asks.

“Orange. I mean, Banana.”

“You children will be the death of me,” says my father. 

“Don’t ever say that,” says my mother. 

My best friend Jackie’s birthday party is today. I wish I was there instead of here. Her mother buys cake from the store and lets Jackie pick out store-bought dresses. I never get to go to birthday parties or buy dresses from the store. Our family has gone on this same vacation every July since 1965, to celebrate the Gemini 4 spacewalk, even though we never reach Big Bear Mountain before it’s time to turn around and head home. I’d feel stupid trying the same things over and over, but that’s how my parents are. 

“I’m hungry,” Cary says.

“Me too,” I say.

“Me three,” Basil taps out in Morse code with his feet. I taught him Morse code after our mother figured out what we said in pig latin. “I want jellybeans,” Basil taps. At least, I think that’s what he says, the problem being that with shoe taps, it can be hard to tell the difference between a dit and a dah. 

Cary, who only knows the Morse code words for candy, says, “I want jellybeans, too!” 

Basil laughs, taps, “Tell some dead baby jokes.” 

I use my fingernails on the seat to say, “ …. -–.–/ -.. -–/ -.–-–..- / . –.–. – -.–/ .- /- .-. ..- -.-. -.- / ..-. ..- .-.. .-.. / -–..-. / -.. . .- -.. / -… .- -… .. . … ..–.. ,” Morse code for, “How do you unload a truckload of dead babies?” 

Basil taps, “ .–.. – …. / .- / .–. .. – -.-. …. ..-. -–.-. -.,” Morse code for, “With a pitchfork.” 

My mother doesn’t like us to joke about dead babies. She thinks it’s about her baby, when these are just the jokes everyone tells at school.

My father curses the narrow lane and steep incline, curses my mother’s tears, curses when he hits the brakes and Basil slams into the tailgate. He curses in the language he calls the Mother Tongue. You don’t need to understand the words to understand what he is saying because the words sound exactly like what they mean. “Es iz farshtunken!” my father yells. Everything stinks. His hand veins are tangled oak roots. I see them swell and pulse and stretch with each heartbeat. He drives, red-faced and bent-backed, a few inches too short to see over the dash. His hair needs washing but he forgets about things like that. He remembers every moment he spent in the camps but can’t remember to wash his hair. 

I look out the window. Colors swirl the way they do when Basil washes out his paintbrush in a glass of water.

“Slow down,” our mother screams.

“Zindik nit!” says our father. He wants her to stop complaining.

“Oy vey iz mir,” says our mother. The pain of the world is mine.

Basil has freed both hands from the ropes. He tugs my ponytail.

I turn around, mouth, “I’ll tell.” There’s an old tire-water smell in here that’s making me gag. “Could we puhleeze open some windows?” I ask.

Basil stuffs his hands inside the knot, says, “The baby farted.”

“The baby farded.” Cary says what he thinks he heard and cracks up.

Our mother can’t quite hear what is happening but still knows we’re misbehaving. 

“I survived the Holocaust for you?” she says. 

She’s mean sometimes, but not as mean as Basil calling her a Nazi. Nazi is a magic word that can make a person disappear. When parents misbehave there’s nobody to punish them. When children make mistakes, well, out comes the Ivory soap. 

“I see a really tall tree,” says Cary.

My father panics, asks, “Where?”

Cary, pointing toward the edge of the road, says, “There. Do you see it?”

“Don’t scare him like that,” says my mother.

“It’s just a tree!” I say.

“Trust me. Nothing is just a tree. Trees can fall,” my father says. “Trees can catch fire. Someone could be hiding behind a tree.” He watches the only little piece of road he can see before driving into a blind curve that makes the future disappear. He worries a car will take the curve too fast and drifts toward the shoulder to avoid that. The tires lose their grip on the gravel. Everyone screams like we’re on a roller coaster ride. My father would rather drive off the edge of the mountain than risk being hit by an oncoming car. 

I would rather see what’s up ahead. It’s too bad the only thing in focus is the back of my father’s seat.

My mother gasps, “Manfred! Slow down.” 

Cary shakes the bruised globe in both hands and, when a new fortune floats into the window, asks, “Can we go home?” 

“Cary Grant Blumenkranz, that’s enough!” My mother was thirty-seven when she had me and has no patience left for Basil or Cary. 

“Why is it enough?” Cary asks. 

“I’ve had it!” my father yells.

I roll my eyes, and my mother says, “I saw that.”

“You did not,” I say.

“I have eyes in the back of my head,” she says.

“Why do you have eyes at the back of your head?” Cary asks.

“Because,” says my mother. “I just do.”

“Oh, mother,” I say. I really hate vacations. Jackie has been to Hawaii twice. She even got to snorkel. My parents will never let me snorkel because they had to take a boat to come to America and now they’re afraid of the ocean. At least we get to go to Disneyland because my father believes everything is safe there. My parents hate going anywhere outside, except they like Disneyland, maybe because it has a fence around it. My father gets a discount Magic Kingdom card from work but you only get three E tickets. We always go to the Frontierland shooting gallery and we always go on the Fantasyland Autopia car ride. They won’t let me go on the Bobsled alone and they are too scared to go with me, but they let us take the raft to Tom Sawyer’s Island. We don’t get to ride the teacups at the Mad Tea Party ride anymore because Basil and I spun the orange one so fast Cary cried and the baby flew out of our cup. 

“I’m starving!” Basil whispers.

“Me too,” I say.

“Me three,” says Cary. 

My father says, “You don’t know what starving is!” and tells us for the millionth time what starving is. “I survived,” he says, “because a guard took pity and poured me an extra spoonful of watery soup.” 

I hate the next part of this story.

“My little brother died because I didn’t share my soup to save his life.”

His stories make me feel like my belly is filled with rocks. His stories make me feel like I did something wrong. 

“We’re still hungry,” I say.

“Shush! You make your papa nervous with all your talking,” says my mother. She passes back four wrapped candies. The cellophane came unwrapped in her purse and bits of tobacco and hair are stuck to two of them. I give the coconut to Cary and the lemon to Basil. I keep the butterscotch because I’m the oldest. The baby gets the candy-striped green and white mint that’s so old nobody else will eat it, even if they are starving. Cary puts his in his mouth, but when he starts singing “Old MacDonald” his candy falls into the baby’s lap, right beside the striped mint. Cary bursts into tears knowing I won’t pick it up and wipe it off and hand it back to him. 

“My candy!” he wails. 

“Ask the 8-Ball when we’ll get to Big Bear,” I tell him, but Cary will not be distracted. He pounds the 8-Ball against the back of my mother’s seat. 

She twists, stretches, manages to grab the ball from him and toss it out the window. 

“Hey!” I say. “That was Basil’s.” 

Basil is so furious he knocks a chunk from the back of the baby’s skull with his fist. Dust spews from the hole. 

“Mother! The baby really stinks!” I say.

My mother screams, “Veronica Lake Blumenkranz! What did you do now?”

“I did nothing. Stop blaming me! Maybe you should take one of your yellow pills,” I tell her. She buys them by the hundreds for anxiety. Jackie got so excited when she saw the pills she stole ten for her older brother. Since then, James always says hello to me when I visit. My mother has so many pills she doesn’t notice if I give him more. 

“Valium is a good idea, Berta,” says my father. 

“Okay,” my mother says. She opens the glove box, rummages for her pill box, and swallows one with spit. 

“How much longer?” I ask. 

“We’re almost there,” my mother says, and for one second there is quiet, until my father slams on the brakes and screams, “Snake!” He’s wild-eyed and desperate. He spies a turnout and skids into it. He makes an awkward, too-fast turn that sends Basil kerplunk against the tailgate and slams the baby’s carrier into my side. I can’t move out of the way.

My father speeds back toward the place where the snake’s curled on the road. A western diamondback suns himself near the centerline. Western diamondbacks are pit vipers who can find food from the heat of its prey. This one is so big and fat it probably ate a bunny before falling asleep.

“Are snakes friendly?” Cary asks.

“There’s a reason why they call them snakes,” my mother says. 

My father veers into the opposite lane so he can run over the rattler. There’s a tiny thud like when he’s run over the uncoiled hose Basil’s left in the driveway. My father brakes and shifts into reverse. He backs over the snake again and the thud is tinier still. He brakes, rushes forward, backs up, and repeats this back and forth and back and forth until the thuds grow quieter and quieter, until the snake gets smaller and smaller, until all we see are shiny scales on the road. A couple more back-and-forths and even the scales vanish. 

“Mazel tov,” says my mother. “It’s dead.” Basil giggles, kicks the back of my seat.

“We’re okay,” my father says. “Let’s go.”“Can I have the rattle?” Cary asks. 

“No,” my father says. “It might be poisonous.” 

“Rattles aren’t poisonous,” I say. My father is an engineer who knows about such things but he says this so we don’t fight. 

“That was fun. Can we do it again?” Cary asks. 

“We will,” I say, and my mother says, “Not if I can help it. We want to get there before dark.” Except there’s dark around every curve and no matter how fast you drive forward you never get close. 

“I’m tired,” my father says. His face is the color of raw sausage.

“Let’s rest, Manfred,” my mother says.

“No,” says my father. 

The road shimmers like Marilyn Monroe’s sequined dress. “I see a lake in the road,” I say. 

“It’s a mirage,” says my father.

“What’s a mirage?” Cary asks.

“It’s an optical effect.”

“What’s an octopus feet?” Cary asks.

“There is heat near the ground and cool air above it,” says my father. “Light is refracted by the difference in temperature so you see images of sky over the road.” 

“This explains nothing!” says my mother.

“It explains everything,” my father answers.

“What’s the point of science?” says my mother. 

“It pays the bills,” my father answers.

“Science will not save you,” says my mother.

“Class is over,” my father answers.

Basil kicks the back of my seat.

“I don’t feel good,” my father says.

“I have to go potty,” Cary says.

“You’ll have to wait like everyone else,” says my mother.

This whole day has been about waiting. It will only get worse if Cary keeps complaining. “It just feels like you have to pee but maybe you don’t since none of us have gotten anything to drink all day,” I tell Cary. “Try counting up every snake you see,” I say. 

My father hears me say the S-word and weaves across the lane. “Snake?” he asks. “Where?” 

“You’re too close to the edge,” my mother says.

“You want to take over?” my father asks.

My mother goes quiet. She hasn’t driven since getting a speeding ticket. She heard the siren and pulled over and trembled when the policeman clomped up in black, shiny boots. When he tapped on the glass, she sat frozen, staring at his uniform. He asked her to roll down the window and she disappeared inside herself. My father had to leave work and come home early. My mother didn’t talk to anyone for two days. 

Cary pretends to shake a pretend 8-Ball and asks questions that sound like wrong answers. “I’ll ask later,” he says. “I am certain.” 

Basil moans, clunks, moans.

“Slow down!” My mother says.

My father slams on the brakes and stops in the middle of the road, his face puffy and red like a balloon. He switches off the ignition.

I don’t know what to do next. So I open the door and toss the baby’s carrier onto the road. The carrier bounces up and down, ends up near the yellow line. I close the door. The baby is gone. For the first time I can smell the mountains. I can’t tell if the white I see is snow or the cloud line. 

“Yay!” Cary says. “No more stink.” 

Basil taps a message on the tailgate: …. .. .–. / …. .. .–. / …. ..- .-. .-. .- -.–-.-.–, hip hip hurray. 

My mother says, “My boobs are like concrete. I need to feed the baby.” 

And sure enough, I smell rot and see the carrier found its way back and now pokes me like a cactus that’s been dead long enough to be hollow but still have its spikes.

I set the carrier in my lap so she can take out the baby and hold it to her chest. 

“I’m squished,” I say.

“Shush,” she answers. She reminds us how nursing my brothers and me leeched all the calcium from her body. It’s our fault her bones are crumbling. But when she nurses that baby she looks calm, the way she looks after taking her yellow pills. 

My mother says, “You don’t know how good you children have it.” 

“We do everything for them,” says my father, wheezing. He looks small, weak, tired. He slumps against the wheel. 

My mother says, “Did you forget your medicine?,” and my father wipes his brow and asks, “Didn’t I take it this morning?” 

Vacation makes you lose track of time, which, my father says, is the point. I hear the snake’s rattle in my father’s breathing. 

“You better drive, Veronica,” my father says. He opens his car door and swings his legs around, steps out. His hands tremble and he leans against the car to prop himself up then help me out. 

“I don’t know how to drive!”

My mother pats the empty driver’s seat. “Try,” she says.

I’ve never started a car, never parked, or backed up. I can’t even take driver’s ed for three more years. 

“Veronica,” says my father. He presses his chest with a fist. “Do this for me, please?” He guides me toward his seat, kisses my cheek, closes the front door. I watch him grab his chest and crumple to the road. 

“Daddy!” screams Cary.

I clamber out and rush to him, shake his shoulders. Insects buzz and leaves rustle and a horn blares from far away. The most important thing in the world has just happened without the world noticing.

My mother walks over to join me, pats my head. “I knew this would happen,” she says. “I just didn’t expect it yet.”

He was here one moment, not here the next. He was sitting and talking and driving. Standing and waving and kissing. Now, he’s on the ground, skin white as Ivory soap. “How can he be dead when the rest of us are fine?” 

“He is fine,” says my mother. “Those that go first have it easy.” 

I don’t know if the feeling in my belly is confusion or anger or sadness or worry or shock. When my parents talked about death it was always blood and pain and cold. Gunshots and screams. “He can’t be dead,” I say. “He can’t be.” 

“Trust me. I’m an expert on death.”

“How can you act so calm?” I ask.

“When you’ve already lost everybody, you stop caring before you lose anyone else.”

“You didn’t lose us,” I say. 

“Just get in the car,” my mother says.

“We can’t leave him!”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” my mother says. “He died outside to make it easier. We both cleaned up plenty of dead people during the war. You can’t wash the cold off your hands. He wanted it this way,” my mother says. “No pain. No worry, at least for him. For you, the pain is just starting. You get used to it.” 

“Like you did?” I say.

“Like I did,” she says. She steers me back to the driver’s seat. My mother takes her place and reaches into the glove box. She looks at her watch before shaking out a Valium. “One pedal for go. The other for stop, like the Disneyland Autopia cars where you took driving lessons.”

It all makes sense. We didn’t go to Disneyland for fun. We went to Disneyland to learn how to survive, to drive, to shoot, to hide and find our way back from Tom Sawyer’s Island, to walk all day without food or water. 

I’m so nervous I almost don’t notice a bad smell, but then I see in the rearview mirror that the baby is back in its carrier. “We should untie Basil,” I say. 

“Only if he’s sorry,” my mother says. 

Basil kicks the tailgate twice. He Houdinis out of his rope and gag and he slides across the barrier and into my former seat. “Sorry I called you a you-know-what,” he tells my mother. 

“Don’t call me that word again,” she says.

“He won’t,” I tell her.

“I won’t,” Basil promises.

I work the gas pedal and turn to start back the way we came, toward home. The car sputters forward until I figure out I need to apply steady pressure on the pedal. Basil kicks the back of my seat. “Stop it,” I say. 

Basil kicks again but stops when I glare at him in the rearview mirror. “Why do we have to keep this baby?” Basil asks.

“Shush,” I tell him.

“This baby is the only one I could save,” my mother says. 

In science we dissected white rats with red eyes. After we took everything out from the inside, we stuffed them full of sawdust and sewed up the seams. Those poor rats. When nobody was looking Jackie and I sneaked our rats into our pockets and took them to her house. We sewed them little clothes out of felt and played with them in her room until her mom saw flying bugs and made us throw the rats in the garbage. I cried for weeks after. I can see the sawdust baby with the eyes at the back of my head, which I now know is the rearview mirror, and I sort of understand. 

“When the Nazis deported us, my parents packed us each a suitcase and said we were going on vacation,” says my mother. She picks at a thread in her shirt. 

I’m sick of hearing about how she was the only one in her family strong enough to work, and that’s why she was gone when her mother and baby brother were taken away to be gassed. She tells me like I had something to do about it, like she wants me to feel bad. Maybe things were bad for her and she had to come to America to make them better, but it’s going to be different for me. Someday I will throw out the baby for good. If I’m stuck with that baby, there will never be room in the car for my own baby, if I ever get one. I might want a dog instead. Or a rat—a live one. I won’t carry around my mother’’s bad memories forever. I won’t tell my children stories that make them cry. 

“Snake!” Cary says, pointing at the road. 

There’s a big, shiny rattler shimmering in the last licks of sun. “I see it!” I say, and swerve to run over it. I stop, back up, and run over it again. I shift into reverse, back up, shift into forward. Repeat, repeat, repeat, until there’s nothing left, not even the rattle. Running over something until it vanishes is the most exciting thing I’ve ever done. My chest feels light, like it is filled with clouds. 

“Whee!” says Cary.

“Whee!” says Basil.

“Whee!” I agree. I can’t wait to tell Jackie that I got to drive the car. Basil is laughing and pretty soon I’m laughing so hard tears leak down my cheeks. It’s a struggle to hold the steering wheel and get down the mountain without losing control. “This is fun!” I say. 

“More fun than Disneyland,” Basil says. 

“Again!” Cary says. 

Cars rush past in the other direction, up the mountain. Driving the car was scary for my father, but I like it. The brakes scream and when I round the bend, I smell something burning. While my mother grips the door handle and mutters prayers to the god she stopped believing in during the war, I concentrate on keeping the wheel steady, keeping the car going forward. Before you know it, we’re on the flats. For once in my life, I’m sorry that it never takes as long to go back home as it does to go away.

• • •