rest stop, Oklahoma, 1932(ish)

Oklahoma, 1932(ish)

June peeks out through the bathroom window and sees that nothing has changed: Rosie, wedding band carefully tucked into her purse, flirts with the gas station attendant while Ruth paces circles around the car. One day this nervousness will give them all away, June is sure of it. One day they’ll all get arrested, blamed, thrown into jail because Ruth can’t “just suck it in”; do as I say, not as I do, June thinks, and that pretty much surmises her grandmother.

Edgar is still nowhere to be seen.

Barely any paint still clings to the wood of the windowsill, and that’s on the inside. June follows the lines of the wood: so many jagged splinters jutting out. Not much to hold it together, except for the dust.

Although this gas station seems like a solid building – or more substantial than anything else they’ve passed since Memphis – she can hear the wind howling, screaming, a lunatic banshee on the loose. June tugs at her stockings: plastered against her legs with the dust and wind and sweat. It has to be over 100 degrees outside this afternoon. And yet she’s still wearing them.

“Nice Jewish girls don’t show their naked legs to all of Oklahoma,” June hears Ruth’s vaguely accented critique inside her head before she even takes one step away from the window. Then the Rosie voice inside her head, higher pitched than Ruth’s, adds, “Your bare legs are ugly. It’s that simple.”

June steps away from the window and catches a glance of herself in the mirror. Dusty olive skin, arching eyebrows that accentuate how flat and serious her brown pooling eyes have become: no wonder she doesn’t have any friends. She splashes some water on her face and feels the coldness smart against her skin; as she only now scans for a towel, she notices the tiny red spots on the floor. Nothing more this time: at least he’s taking some precautions for once.

Dust tickles her nostrils and the whole room smells like stale stink contained in iron then covered with a thick layer of dirt. June doesn’t mind, though; it’s better than the alternative. She walks back to the window to watch and wait.

And dream. Of being somewhere else, someone else instead; only once again she can’t conjure up the image of who or where or what she would be doing. The only thing she can concretely imagine is not getting back into the car now, not with them, not any more. She’s had this fantasy before; at every stop on this trip, and the one before. Only each time, her body betrays her and she finds herself behind the driver’s seat, again, map spread out on the seat next to her while Rosie snores, while Ruth stares blankly at the dusty road ahead, her index finger tapping rhythmically on the passenger seat just next to the map, while Edgar slips back into that spectacular void: his bliss.