Call Me a Cab

26

There was not only a laundromat open on Sunday, it was full. We waited five minutes or so until two machines became free, then loaded them up; whites in this one, colored in that one. There’s a strange comic intimacy when your laundry shares a washing machine with her laundry; ‘comic’ because you can’t make the slightest reference to it without feeling like a fool.

While our laundry soaked and swirled, we had lunch in an Ice Cream Parlor, an absolutely straightforward honest-to-God Ice Cream Parlor, complete with the marble counter and the booths with the tall dark-wood seatbacks and the slow-moving ceiling fans. And not some tarted-up imitation, full of fake nostalgia and tacky with-itness, named something like Banana Splitsville; this was Thrughauser’s Ice Cream Parlor, and it was the real thing. At two booths in the back some 1947 teenagers were discussing cars, dates and high school. The old gent behind the counter was everybody’s gray-moustached uncle. And the lady in the black dress and white apron who took our orders was stout, motherly, and cheerful.

Great hamburgers, with relish. Great coffee. And ice cream for dessert, also great. “Maybe we can buy a house and stay forever,” I said.

“What I’m afraid of,” Katharine said, “is we’ll still be here when the town sinks beneath the surface, and you know it won’t rise again for a hundred years.”

“There are worse fates.”

Back at the laundromat, our wash was ready for the dryer. We cajoled the machine with many dimes, then went away to feed gas to the cab. What we found was a gas station with a connecting car wash. “It’s laundry day, right?” I said, and sent the cab through the car wash. Katharine got a road map from the gas station office, and stood in the sunshine perusing it. The cab came out the other end of the car wash gleaming and glistening, looking happier than I’d ever seen it. Taxicabs too need a vacation from the city.

One of the kids with the chamois cloths said to me, “Man, that’s cool. You got this fixed up exactly like the real thing.”

“I’ve even got a meter,” I pointed out.

“I saw that. Terrific, man.”

“Thanks.”

Katharine and I got back into the cab, headed out to the street, and one of those clouds that had been walking around the sky all day paused directly overhead to dump eleven million gallons of rain on us. “God damn son of a bitch,” I said. “I should have known better than get it washed.”

We parked as close to the laundromat as we could get, and made a dash through the rain. The laundry wasn’t dry yet — neither were we, anymore — so we sat to wait on two of the mismatched chrome tube chairs with which all laundromats are fitted out. Katharine still had the road map with her, and she said, “Tom, I’ve been thinking.”

“Oh?”

“I don’t know about you, but I’m getting sick of super-highways.”

“Your little chunk wasn’t so bad.”

“But that was only eight miles, and there won’t be any more of those.” Opening the road map, she said, “Now, Route 70 angles way north from here, and goes up through Denver. But what if we took one of these other roads and just went straight west?”

“You’re talking about the Rocky Mountains there.”

“Well, these are still ordinary roads. It’s not exactly like taking a Conestoga wagon into the wilderness.”

“Also,” I said, “it’s raining.”

“No, it isn’t.”

I turned to look out the window, and damn if the sun wasn’t shining again.

“These will be perfectly fine roads,” Katharine said. “They’ll just be more real, that’s all.”

I too was sick of the Interstates, and was not at all eager to repeat yesterday afternoon’s grinding experience of driving hour after hour directly into the sun, but on the other hand I knew this was simply another of Katharine’s stalling techniques, and I thought the only honorable thing to do under the circumstances was be devil’s advocate, so I said, “Katharine, you’re just trying to delay things a little more.”

“No, I’m not. This wouldn’t be much longer at all. In the first place, Route 70 does this long loop around to the north, and we’d be going straight west, and a straight line is the shortest distance between two points.”

“I’ve heard that someplace.”

Ignoring my dumb levity, she said, “And in the second place, you know how the cities always slow us down, and Denver would be the same thing. If we take one of these roads — see them? — if we take one of them, we’ll bypass all the big cities. Denver to the north, and Colorado Springs to the south. Then we’d connect up with Route 70 again somewhere on the other side.” Putting the road map down, she said, “Come on, Tom, let’s get off the highway for a while.”

I was weakening. In fact, I was defeated, though I fought back feebly one last time: “Call Barry,” I said. “Try the idea on him. If he says it’s okay, then it’s okay with me.”

“Come on, Tom,” she said. “You know I can get Barry to say yes.”

“I just want you to go through the process.”

“You just want to avoid the responsibility,” she said accurately, and went away to twist Barry around her little finger.