Call Me a Cab

18

Noon, and we were still eighty miles from Kansas City. Our late start had been complicated by my hangover, which made me slightly jittery and awkward, so that I drove more slowly than usual. But the protein Katharine had insisted I shovel in was beginning to take effect, and time itself was engaged in its legendary healing process, so I was steadily feeling more human.

As for Katharine, my occasional glances in the rearview mirror showed her suffering the deadline whim-whams once more. Talking to herself, looking agitated, brushing her hands back through her hair; all the symptoms I remembered from that first day on the way to Kennedy airport were once again in evidence, and getting stronger. It was on the way to being a total relapse.

The countryside was flatter here than it had been east of the Mississippi. Square or rectangular fields of corn and wheat and other growing things — I’m no farmer, I wouldn’t know a rutabaga from a rapscallion — were spread in undulating neatness in all directions, under a sun so high and clear it was like a growing-lamp hung in the sky by the Department of Agriculture. The sky itself was a cloudless pale blue, rising to a deeper blue at the horizon. I’m sorry, but the sky was like a bowl and the green-and-tan land was like a checkerboard. Some of those archetypal descriptions just can’t be bettered.

Gas was getting low. The trademarks for Chevron and Mobil were red-white-and-blue kites anchored in the sky far ahead; I eased into the right lane, took the exit, and chose one of them. “And check the oil,” I told the kid in the Kansas City Chiefs sweatshirt.

He gawped at me. “This here’s a New York City taxicab, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is.”

“You’re sure a long way from home.”

“You bet.”

He went off, shaking his head, to fill the tank and check the oil, and I turned around to say, “Katharine.”

She looked at me in an impatient distracted way; I was keeping her from poking at the sore tooth. “What?”

“Come sit up front.”

“Why?”

“We’ll talk.”

At first, this suggestion seemed only to annoy her. She shook her head irritably, turning away to frown out her window at the gas pumps, then looked back with a quizzical expression, studied my face, thought it over, and said, “Thank you, Tom. You’re right.”

While she was transferring I cleared the front seat of roadmaps — some went on the dash, some got stuck down between seat and door — and when she slid in next to me she already looked less upset, though she had nothing to say.

Fewer gas stations are on credit cards — other than their own — since the Arab oil crunch. Once again Katharine had to pay cash, and when the boy brought back the change he said to me, “How far you goin?”

“Los Angeles.”

“Started in New York?”

“Sure.”

“You’re gonna be awful mad if I tell you,” he said. He was smirking, looking very amused about something.

Wasn’t Los Angeles there anymore? Perhaps it had finally fallen into the sea, during an earthquake, while a great Voice spake from Heaven, and It cryeth: “Enough! No more tacky!” I said, “Go ahead, tell me.”

He leaned close through the window; it was time he changed his sweatshirt. Confidential, keeping his voice too low for the passenger to hear, he said, “You forgot to turn your meter on.”

“Well, son of a gun,” I said, looking at the meter in question. Then I shrugged and said, “The heck with it. Too late now. Thanks, though.” As I drove away, the boy’s smirk was just beginning to turn puzzled.

Well, Katharine was up front with me, but she didn’t immediately turn into a chatterbox. We got back onto Route 70, eased gradually up to seventy-five miles an hour, and I said, “Penny for your thoughts.”

“I wish I was married,” she said.

I glanced at her profile, which was very very gloomy. “You mean already married, decisions over and done with?”

“No. I wish I’d been married before, like you. So I’d know more about it now.”

“You could have been married ten times before,” I pointed out, “and you still wouldn’t know what marriage with Barry would be like.”

“Still.”

Which pretty well short-circuited the conversation for a few minutes, until I asked her a question that had been in my mind several times the last couple of days: “How come you haven’t been married?”

“What? Well — it just never happened.”

“Phooey. What are you, twenty-eight?”

“Thirty,” she said, with a little smile.

“People have asked you to marry them,” I said. “Before Barry.”

“Actually, not so much,” she said. “I don’t know how things were in the old days, but in my case men mostly asked me to move in with them.” She was relaxing a bit more, now that she was talking; scrunching down in the seat, she said, “My sophomore year in college I lived with a boy. His name was Andy.”

“Did he ask you to marry him?”

“Yes. At the end of the year. He was a senior, and he was graduating and going to the University of Virginia for his Master’s. He wanted me to go with him, and he said why don’t we get married?”

“And you said?”

“I said I don’t want to get married.”

“You wanted to finish college.”

“Well, partly.” Then she giggled, a surprising sound, and said, “Can I tell you something silly?”

“I’m sure you can.”

“It was the refrigerator,” she said.

“The refrigerator.”

“Andy’s mother,” she explained, “was one of those crazy Tupperware ladies, everything in her life inside a plastic Tupperware container with the lid on it and a label glued to it, and stuck in the refrigerator. And Andy was the same way. She used to mail him Tupperware. Empty Tupperware containers, for his own use. The Parcel Post man would come with a package, and we’d open it up, and here’s this Tupperware. And inside it there’s another one, and another one inside that. And the last one empty.”

“I can see where this isn’t particularly romantic,” I said, “but I don’t get the connection with why you didn’t want to marry him.”

“I hate leftovers.”

“Oh.”

“I didn’t originally, but I do now. I have ever since. Our refrigerator was full of leftovers. But Andy wasn’t neat like his mother, he didn’t put labels on things, he just put them all in the refrigerator, saying he’d ‘remember.’ And a true Tupperware person, you know, never takes anything out of a Tupperware container, that defeats the whole purpose. After a while, I just hated to even think about the refrigerator.”

“It got full, huh?”

“It got scary. The things I could identify — like half a slice of toast, and I’m not kidding — those were bad enough, but the real killers were the things you couldn’t recognize at all. Every once in a while I’d go through what I called an Anonymous Reject Day. I’d pick a time when Andy was in class, and I’d take six or seven of the oldest and most anonymous Tupperwares out of the refrigerator and throw them away.”

“Wouldn’t he notice the empties?”

“You don’t understand me,” she said. “Do you think I was going to open those things, touch what was inside? When I say I threw them away, I mean I threw them away.”

“Ah hah.”

“It was the only way to leave enough room for milk and eggs.”

“And Andy never caught on.”

“Never.”

“But when he asked you to marry him and go live in Virginia—”

“All I could see was that refrigerator, for the rest of my life. I couldn’t face it.”

“Absolutely understandable.”

“And the thing is,” she said, half turning toward me, being very solemn and serious, “the thing is, in every other way Andy was terrific. He was very bright, and he had a good sense of humor, and he respected my individuality, and... um. I don’t know how to say this.”

“He was good in bed.”

She sighed. “If you mention sex in front of a man, he thinks you’re offering some.”

“Exception noted.”

“Not that I have any desire to go into the gory details,” she assured me. “But, yes, Andy was the first guy I ever slept with that I had a really wonderful time. I’d had some sexual experiences before — not many — but it had been fun and that’s all. You know? Like dancing.”

“Got it.”

“I learned a lot from Andy.” Grinning in lascivious reminiscence, she said, “We learned a lot from one another.”

“If you keep leering like that,” I said, “I’ll tell you about my experiences.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I’m being provocative.”

“Somebody is. Anyway, with Andy, Tupperware was stronger than sex.”

“Absolutely.”

“It seems to me,” I said thoughtfully, “just from that one experience you already have a pretty good idea what marriage is.”

“I think you’re being cynical,” she said.

“You said Andy was every other way perfect.”

“I said terrific; that’s not quite perfect.”

“Okay, terrific. But you had to live with the guy, in a marital kind of situation, to know what he was really like for you. So it’s the same thing with Barry, isn’t it?”

“Hardly,” she said. “Barry and I have slept together, you know.”

“I guessed.”

“We’ve lived together, too, on and off.”

“How much on, how much off?”

“What?”

Had she thought that a sexual reference? “How much time in the last two years,” I rephrased it, “have you spent living together?”

“Oh. I don’t know exactly. A week or two here, a week or two there. Last year I spent six weeks in California on a job, and I lived with Barry almost the entire time. And he’s lived with me in New York, and we’ve shared hotel rooms in different places. There aren’t any Tupperware surprises ahead of me with Barry, if that’s what you mean.”

“Okay. Then the question is, what’s holding you back?”

She looked at me with troubled eyes. “That’s the question, all right,” she said.