CHAPMAN TOWN
I find a journal entry about an impulsive trip to visit high-school friend Meryl in Chico—how the Bomb broke down after dark, just outside of a tiny town called Winters, and I wound up spending the night in the trailer of the clerk who worked the night shift at the neighboring 7-11.
…
“I’m sitting in my swimsuit at a window across from Cervantes’ Automotive Shop. A wiry old Chicano and half a dozen of his offspring are climbing around on the roof, laying tar paper. The air is abuzz with insect racket, the heat a heavy sedative. This is Chapman Town—parched, weedy plots and ramshackle huts…
“I arrived in Chico in the late afternoon yesterday. There was no ‘Ramby,’ Meryl’s geriatric station wagon, parked alongside her hovel, but I decided to knock anyway, my jeans ripping stickily from the seat as I climbed out of my car. On the highway I had pulled the pop-top off a Coke I had braced between my thighs. It fizzed over and ran down the seat. Sitting in my soft drink, I remembered the old Coke ad. ‘Well, there’s more than one way to take the pause that refreshes,’ I mused.
“When no one answered my knock, I rattled the front and back doors, excavated in the dust on the stoop for a hidden key, and howled ‘Meryl!’ in complaint. She was supposed to be home by 4:00, and it was 4:33. Not knowing what else to do, I scrawled a message on a paper towel from my car, left it in her mailbox, then drove back uptown to wile away some time.
“Though it was Saturday, the stores along the main street were closed, to my surprise, and the sidewalk so deserted, it might have been a ghost town. I saw a temperature display outside a bank—94 degrees. About this time my cockpit was feeling more like a barbecue pit, my steering wheel grilling my hands, so I parked and staggered up the smoldering sidewalk like the last survivor on a Sahara dune.
“When at last I found an open hardware store, I stripped off my sweatshirt in the restroom and swabbed myself with sopping paper towels. Still dripping, I left in search of air conditioning and anything potable with ice.”
…
“Meryl’s’s homestead is two tiny rooms. The door and window frames, painted a peeling, unappealing turquoise, are all skewed at improbable angles to the floor. The corners are inhabited by colonies of spiders taking siestas in their cobweb hammocks.
“‘Meryl, why is there a scummy ring in the bottom of my glass of lemonade?’ She’s asking me whether she should take along her whoopee cushion to ingratiate herself with the Eskimos. She’s going to Alaska to do research for a botany paper on the ways they use plants. She wants me to help her wrap her Christmas gifts for her sister’s family (it’s June)—in birthday paper, since that’s all she has.
“Now she’s wondering whether to bring a couple of recorders to teach the subjects of her thesis how to play ‘The Sailor’s Hornpipe.’
“Her odd, unfinished projects are scattered everywhere—assorted tool handles she turned on a lathe but never attached to blades, a smelly old sheepskin she cured, drying on a beam, and the aforementioned, overdue gifts she made herself: a gnomish spice rack, a chicken-shaped cutting board and accompanying egg-shaped one, and a brass fig leaf paperweight.”
EVE
On the way home from Meryl’s, I happened upon an isolated highway:
“On dusty back roads, I zigzagged across miles of farmland—flooded fields with needles of green poking out, new-furrowed plots looking at a distance like patches of umber corduroy, orchards planted in neat rows which appeared to march in formation like ranks of soldiers as I sped past. At last I came to a steep, solitary blacktop that ascended heavenward, cushioned on either side by plushy hills. Up I sped, the single sentient thing on the landscape. The world and I seemed to belong exclusively to each other for that hour. Even in the heat, I felt transported by that voluptuously private communion. My back adhered to the seat with a sticky suction. Drops of sweat ran down my belly. Without slowing, I pulled off my shirt and bra and felt the hot wind rushing over my breasts. Still driving, I wriggled out of my jeans and panties. Momentarily naked, I felt as voluptuously reckless as Eve in the primal garden, having just tasted the apple and wanting urgently and without preliminaries to fit her body around the warm firmness of the first man.”