The Good Ocean

My wife and I are driving across the country. Driving along on Route number—no, I will not tell you the route number. I will not give you the country. I do not even want to say my wife’s name, but that would be taking it too far, and could get awkward if some other woman should enter the scene.

So her name is Tiffany. My wife, not some other woman who has not yet entered the scene. Tiffany is a stripper’s name now, but when my wife was born it was the name of a lamp or an upscale store in New York. She likes to be called Tiff so she will not be mistaken for a stripper, though in all honesty, this is unlikely. I do not mean this in an insulting way. She just doesn’t look anything like a stripper. Or a lamp, for that matter.

She is looking out the window at a distant water tower. She is eating pecans and has some sugar from that around the corner of her mouth. Or maybe it’s salt. I don’t know how pecans are cooked or served. She bought a bag of them at the last gas stop and I just got coffee and a pack of cigarettes. But I can’t smoke. Not in the car. Not while she is in it. I have to wait for Tiff to need to stop for a bathroom break, and while she is in the rest area toilets, laying down her usual protective cushion of toilet paper, I will get a chance to maybe smoke two cigarettes. If the pecans are salted instead of sugared it could be a long time before I get to smoke.

“Want to play the game?” I ask.

“Sure,” she says. “What’s the subject.”

I think for a moment. “Words that end in ‘tion’. You go first.”

“OK. Traction”

“Seduction,” I say.

“Retraction.”

“Salutation”

“Sanitation.”

“Multiplication”

“Subtraction.”

“Contraction.”

“Retraction.”

“I said retraction.”

“Position.”

“Sedition.”

It goes on for another half hour or so, ending, appropriately enough, with “Extinction,” as we are passing a field of cattle.

“Want to play cows and cemeteries,” I ask.

“Maybe later.”

I watch the cows disappear in the rear view mirror. I can still smell them. Tiff makes a face that says she can smell them too. I don’t eat meat, but cannot imagine a world without cattle, without that smell. And what would happen if no one ate them? Would they be released? Would they survive?

We are driving across the country because the other day I came home from work and said: Hey, I just got a month off of work, let’s drive across the country.

No kidding.

And she said: “How come you got a month off of work?”

“They have to close the building down for emergency repairs,” I said. “Asbestos or something. Something deadly. It’s all paid time. Let’s go see the ocean.”

This, by the way, (just between you and me) is a complete lie. I have been fired.

“The ocean is only an eight hour drive away,” my wife correctly pointed out.

“The other ocean,” I told her. “The good one.”

So we packed our bags. Swimsuits, her pills and everything, even though it was only early spring on our side of the country and the filthy remnants of this year’s snow were still melting on the tree lawn. I had some money; I had sold my record collection on the way home—pulled it in several crates from the storage locker and hauled it to a dealer I knew who’d had his eyes on it for years. Then I traded some of my plasma in for spare change. Tiff never liked my records, so I knew she wouldn’t miss them. And my missing plasma would go safely unnoticed.

The plasma place gave me a cookie and a glass of orange juice on my way out the door. Also a sticker saying I that I was a “Donor Hero!” It had a cartoon of a hand giving the thumbs-up sign on it. I threw out the sticker, but the juice and cookie were OK. That was my meal for the day. I was conserving.

Of course, I could have just told my wife that I had lost my job. Sure I could have, but where was the fun in that? Where was the fun in her hurt and worried looks, my explanations of injustice, my assurances that everything would be all right, and then me staying up after she had fallen asleep just to make sure she didn’t get out of bed at night to sneak off to the bathroom and take a handful of sleeping pills or just a bottle of aspirin even because that’s all we had in the house?

“A new ocean would be nice,” she said when I had finally convinced her, and then we packed our clothes (and swimsuits) and hit the road.

On the way out our neighborhood we saw a couple of kids trying to ride their sled down their own filthy pile of left-over snow. It was funny and sad. The sled hit the grass and mud at the bottom of the pile—which wasn’t even more than a few feet high—and the two kids went toppling over.

I don’t know if they were laughing or crying at the end of it. We had driven past them by that time. I had just managed to catch them going head over heals in my rear view mirror.

“Did you see that?” I asked Tiff.

She hadn’t.

I thought about those kids all the way to the freeway.