I squirm in my seat waiting for the final bell to ring. My Mema and Pepa have come to visit us, and they are better than Disneyland and a roller rink combined. I love them so much, I wish they weren’t going to hell.
On cue, I grab my Little House on the Prairie lunchbox and run like a hummingbird with legs—I wish those existed because that would be the neatest thing ever—out into the dry, desert heat to get on my bus.
It takes me a second to register the tall man standing next to a white pickup truck. He is instantly familiar but so out of place, he’s unrecognizable. But then my brain assembles the puzzle, and I run shrieking with joy into his arms.
“You wanna ride, sweetheart?” He says in a mumbled drawl, with a wide, dentured grin beaming out from under his sweat colored baseball cap.
“Yes! yes! yes!” I bounce up and down like a small dog trying to reach a counter top.
By now, my sister has arrived, and some of our friends crowd around in awe, as if President Reagan himself has pulled up in his motorcade. Pepa picks us up, one by one, and lifts us into the rusty bed of his veteran truck as we giggle with delight.
He slowly steers out of the school parking lot and down the main drag of the military base where we live. My dad commands a unit that goes out into the desert and pretends to fight wars. He comes back with little tins of food with chocolates inside that we get to eat.
My dad is very, very important, but not as important as the Generals, whose big houses line the road along the parade grounds that Pepa now chauffeurs us past. We pretend we are tiara-adorned beauty queens on a float, and we smile and wave to the poor, ordinary people who stare at us from adjacent cars and sidewalks. Maybe the Generals’ wives can even see us from their wide, covered porches as they sip their cool, afternoon cocktails and go over the dinner party seating chart.
When I get home, I will illicitly overhear tense adult conversation and tears of good-bye and questions about why we have to go to Africa and Jesus is the answer and I will imagine again my grandparents being devoured by eternal fires. But right now, in the back of this truck, I am the queen of the whole world and of my Pepa’s heart, which is the very same thing.
I am sleepy but wide awake in the back of a white van that races through a pitch-black night. Cool, sweet, smoky air wafts in through cracked windows, and I pull my jacket tighter and hug my teddy bear, Arthur, closer as I listen to the adults chattering. My parents pepper my just-met missionary “aunts” and “uncles” with queries about our new life.
“Generally, you don’t want to drive at night here,” the driver says, as he does just that. “People leave all kinds of stuff in the middle of the road without reflectors. But that’s Africa.”
After about an hour, I still can’t decide if I want to sleep or remain alert, but our arrival ends the debate. The van pulls up next to a block of motel-like rooms, and the missionaries unload our suitcases, packed to the gills with everything we might need until our sea container arrives sometime in the too-distant future. My mother assigned a small duffel bag each to my sister and me to pack our toys and books. After adding Arthur and an obligatory children’s Bible, there was barely enough room for a few Strawberry Shortcake dolls, and I wondered how they would survive months and months without their Berry Bakeshop.
The room is sparse and cavernous, with cement floors and scuffed, barren walls. The water runs brown out of the faucets, and I am instructed not to drink it. My mother tucks us into two, tangled up metal bunkbeds that clang like pots and pans whenever anyone moves. A few unfamiliar insects buzz about, seduced by the illuminated light bulb hanging forlornly from the ceiling. I plunge as far as I can beneath the covers, pretending I am diving for pennies in a pristine pool, and pray, as I always do, for the souls of my Mema and Pepa and that I might wake up to the smell of strawberry Pop-Tarts warming in a toaster somewhere over an American rainbow.
But then, the sun rises, and I find myself at home.
A Renault is a tiny car, the smallest car I have ever seen. My friend Greta is Swedish, and her mother drives all the white kids home many days in a blue one. There are only a handful of us white kids at our primary school in this mid-sized town at the foot of Mt. Kenya. We fit in pretty well amongst our Kenyan classmates, despite the blatantly preferential treatment we get from some teachers, but we barely fit inside Mrs. Johanssen’s microscopic French car.
As we have many times before, we begin our ascent up steep Green Hills hill. At the summit is the Green Hills Hotel, a mid-range establishment owned by the Kenyan Vice President where my family often swims and eats golden-battered fish and chips with lemon squeezed over it on Sunday afternoons, our reward for having sat through some interminably long church service, often in Kikuyu, on backless benches, with curious children stroking my long blonde hair.
The hill always provokes an argument with the Renault, which apparently believes it is protected by French labor laws even at a great distance. It sputters its displeasure every time, but today it is particularly uncooperative and insolent. It slows as we reach the hill’s midpoint, and takes a laconic puff of its cigarette while Mrs. Johanssen frantically shifts gears and pushes pedals. The Renault then goes on strike, leaving us stranded on a steep incline.
We squeal with delighted terror as we begin to roll backwards, down, down the hill, like a pendulum coming back the other way. An ascending car or two swerves to miss us. For a few seconds, it’s like we are in a real life game of Frogger, before we smash into a mud embankment.
“Is everyone alright?” asks a breathless Mrs. Johanssen in her iambic Swedish accent.
“Let’s do that again!” we beg, to no avail. Mrs. Johanssen promises the Renault yet another day off per week and higher grade petrol, and it begrudgingly pulls us up the hill.
“Dad, is that truck….Is it moving?”
We are passing it on a typical two-lane Kenyan highway, pock-marked with potholes and rimmed by a swirl of cow herders, street vendors, water carriers, baby minders, school children, and loiterers.
“Surely not,” he says, too busy for a close inspection.
The truck’s hood is up, and a man is working underneath it. As we pass by, I closely examine the wheels.
They are in motion.
Our own French car, a white Peugeot station wagon that was never, ever white, is bigger than the Renault, but just as useless for our purposes. Or rather, for my father’s purposes. The mission assigned him to teach science to Kenyan high schoolers, a job for which the Peugeot was perfectly adequate, but that wasn’t where the real evangelistic action was at. So he hung up a large map of Nyeri district in his office wall, plotted out the locations of Baptist congregations, and methodically attacked the gaps, planting new churches every few square miles, no matter how remote the location. This highly-precise, military-like operation put the Peugeot on many roads on which it had no business being, and pretty soon it was the car equivalent of a 62-year-old retired NFL running back.
I peer out the Peugeot’s dusty back window as we pull away from my sister’s dorm at an American mission-run boarding school a few hours from our house. She has told me her dorm is haunted by the ghosts of past residents and the ghosting of current ones. There are some mean girls, but mostly there is the solitude of unbroken circles and closed doors.
But I still dream of going there, of being cool and grown up like she is. I think I will do better and make more friends.
“You might,” she says. “The kids who go really young are more popular.”
I want to go young, and I want to be popular. I look at the pictures of the kids in her yearbook and imagine them asking me to play and wanting to be my friend.
Surely I won’t be running after the Peugeot on a dusty road, like my sister is now, begging my parents through tears not to leave.
I can’t imagine I will be fleeing into my pillow when nightfall envelopes me in its cold, unloving arms, and the knot in my stomach encroaches into my lungs. No, that won’t be me, crying just to make sure I can breathe.
The Peugeot, and its successors, will come and go and come and go, dropping me off at school, bringing me home again, over and over. I will be a small girl crushed beneath its departing wheels and expectantly awaiting its return as if it were Santa’s sleigh on Christmas Eve.
But the emotional tides will eventually turn somewhat. They will even out like a glassy coating over restless waves. I will be grateful and comforted to see the car both come and go, each leg bringing its own sublime feeling of home.
Until it carries me away for the last time. Up, up, up, another steep hill, the steepest of all hills. It can go no further with me, thwarted by the cruel laws of physics, the tyranny of time and space. It dumps me on the side of the road with an even smaller bag than when I arrived, in which I could never fit everything I need for the journey.
I smile to myself with congratulations as I pull out of the gas station in the silver Mitsubishi sedan I share with my sister. I had driven all by myself—an entire hour one way!—to see Mema and Pepa at their house on the lake, where I peacefully bobbed in an inner tube, begging all the muscles that had death-gripped the steering wheel to join my mind as it fled the entire scene of my life.
I have a license, so technically I can drive, but only technically. Just the week before, I had managed to irrevocably park my car barely an inch away from its neighbor, necessitating a humiliating walk into the dorm lobby to ask someone whom I hoped would never see me again to rescue my car from its precarious position. She looked at me with confusion and disgust, accepted my car keys and easily solved my problem.
But that was last week. Today, I have safely arrived back from a bonafide solo road trip. I have remained alive. I have not killed any other human, nor even an armadillo who appeared hell-bent on gruesome death. I have remembered how to pump my own gas. I will now triumphantly return the car, unscathed and with a full tank, to my sister, and she will be proud that I can now play the role of a real, successful American. At least on the road.
I turn onto the street and come to a stop at a red light. I fiddle with the radio dial, looking for some familiar song. The light turns green, but nobody moves. I am confused, so I don’t move either. Something is wrong. For instance, why is the light so far to my right.
I look quizzically at the nearest driver, who looks back at me as if I’m pointing a gun at him. Horns begin honking. He mouths something I can’t make out at first.
“You’re on the wrong side of the road!!!”
I have a stack of printed out Map Quest directions stapled together in the front seat of my now-obsolete white Plymouth Colt. I have my purse and my sunglasses and my snacks. I have a small container of pepper spray attached to my key chain. I have a large Diet Coke in the cupholder. And, most importantly, I have my CD player, loaded with fresh batteries, beside me on the seat. I have carefully lined up a series of CDs next to it, some music, some audiobooks. Enough to fill miles and miles of open road and anxious thought.
I’ll be driving all over the country for months, from archive to archive, researching my dissertation on the temperance movement, in which I’ve long since lost all interest, but I’ve come too far to change course. I’ve come really, really far. And now I’m going to go even further, all by myself.
And I’m off. I’m terrified. But I am also free.
I worry I won’t find the documents I need. I worry the entire concept of my dissertation is stupid and unworkable. I worry I’m not smart enough to pull it off. I worry I will break down on a god-forsaken highway and end up the subject of a true crime show. I worry I’ll have a panic attack in some city’s rush hour traffic. I worry I’ll get smashed between two semis like the insignificant mosquito I fear I am. I worry I am losing my faith.
But mostly I worry I won’t want to come home to the husband I don’t love.
And I won’t. Out on the road, by myself for the first time in my life, I will begin to imagine I don’t have to. I will start to hear the sound of my own voice again. I will see that I am beautiful, or at least not as ugly as I thought. I will discover America is beautiful, too, not nearly so as Kenya, but when the sultry summer sun hits just right on a valley floor as you come around an Appalachian bend, you feel like maybe you can let the grief you’ve been carrying fly out your open window.
Not yet, but maybe soon.
“We’ve been sitting here for two hours already,” Kevin says tersely into his cell phone. “Yes, that’s right, the rest stop just past Exit 17. OK, thanks.”
I am laying across the front seat of a U-Haul truck that carries all my earthly belongings with my head on my fiancé’s lap. It’s well past midnight, as we wait for someone to come and change a flat tire on the car trailer that holds my car. I could have driven my car behind him, but we just couldn’t bear to be apart on the long journey from West Texas to Washington, DC, where I am moving ahead of our wedding.
“They said they’ll be here soon,” he reports.
“They said that two hours ago,” I say. We sigh, then laugh, then kiss. And kiss some more.
I feel I could go ahead and die in this U-Haul truck, I’m so happy. For the first time in my life, I don’t want to be in another place or live another life or be another person or go back in time and reclaim what used to be. I finally put away my photo albums of Kenya and my school years books after poring over them near daily, willing the pages to absorb me.
I’m not completely carefree. I still have to finish my absolutely tortuous dissertation. I am currently unemployed. I don’t want to be a kept woman. And I’m still worried about going to hell, especially now that I am a divorcee.
But I think somehow it will all sort itself out. And I don't care if they ever come fix the tire. Who needs tires when you have love. Who cares about hell when you’ve already found heaven.
I am gasping for breath, sobbing uncontrollably, gripped by panic that is made worse by knowing I am being completely and utterly ridiculous.
I call Kevin in hysterics. “I’m stuck in traffic, I can’t get home, and it’s time to feed her! I have to feed her now!”
“Holly, Holly, it’s OK, it’s OK, she’s fine. She can’t die of starvation that quickly. It’s going to be OK. Is she crying?”
I glance into the rearview mirror of my little silver Honda Fit, perfect for going into the city, as I have today, at my baby daughter, who is awake but nonplussed. She is looking around at the surrounding commotion with wide-eyed fascination, completely unconcerned that she is at the mercy of a parent who is losing their sh*t.
“I can’t do this, Kevin! I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. I’m not going to make it.” I am not intelligible through my sobs. And I’m not just talking about getting home.
“It’s OK, just start breathing, in and out, deep breaths. She’s fine. You’re going to be fine.”
She sits behind the steering wheel of my little silver Honda Fit, perfect for teaching a kid to drive, as I am today. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of newer cars—I’ve been begging Kevin for one of those forever, so far without success—but its maneuverability can’t be beat.
We decided I would teach her to drive because I am improbably less likely to get stressed about it. We can play Taylor Swift and have a whole girl party. My plan to use an empty church parking lot a few blocks from our house has been partially thwarted by a young family who is teaching their preschoolers to ride bikes on one end. I remember those days without nostalgia.
She’s a little nervous about plowing over a small child. “Just don’t get anywhere near them,” I instruct, “It’ll be fine.”
I go through some basics, then we’re off, making loop-de-loops with the car as if in a vehicular production of the Nutcracker and pulling into and backing out of spaces.
“One time in college, I parked so close to another car I couldn’t get out and a stranger had to do it for me,” I tell her, and we both laugh.
“The New Romantics” comes on, one of my favorite Taylor Swift songs, and I turn up the volume and start belting it out. She gives me an annoyed look and turns it down.
“I need to concentrate,” she says. She is visibly nervous.
But not me. I’m not nervous at all. I know she’s going to be OK. Because I know that I am finally OK. She can always stop the car and get out. She can back up and start over. I can drive her myself if she needs me to.
I’m letting her drive away, but I’m staying at home.
Absolutely beautiful piece of writing!
Holly, I don’t think I’ve ever read a better characterization of a Renault required to work. 💯