"Vacation"
July 01, 2005 @ 4:45 p.m.

My story for Susquehanna, third rough draft (tentative final copy). Will probably be published with the other Susquehanna things from various people.

--

Vacation

Where do you belong?
The question made me nervous. Not What are you going to be when you grow up? – another equally-unanswered question – but this one.
It was the question first posed by my mother in June, after I completed freshman year at Glenmore Area High. It came after a particularly tense fight over the phone between her and my father; my father was always trying to get to know me a little more, it seemed, and forgetting what I told him like the absent-minded man he was. He hadn’t really been a big part of my life until the previous summer – I barely remembered kindergarten, my last year of school that he’d been there, living with my mother in town – and since then, I’d only known him through the scowl on my mother’s face as she spoke of him, the two sentences scrawled in a birthday card with a few tucked-in fifties. Awkward phone calls came from him every Christmas to catch up with us, and that was that.
My father was simply a few lines in a cheesy Hallmark gift, two-hundred dollars stuffed in an envelope, terse words on a telephone line.

*

The summer before The Question came, I visited my father a few times; ridden the empty train north, marveling at the speed the land outside the dirty windows passed. It shook a lot and the air conditioning didn’t really work, and I was rather warm in my jeans and t-shirt. I could very vividly remember the first time I stepped off the train into the station in my father’s city – New York City – and after being pushed backwards, I dropped one of my bags and a three-ring binder spewed its contents across the floor. People, so many people, I’d never seen so many people crowded into one enclosed area in my life, and here they were, and I wasn’t enjoying it. They trampled my writing with wet shoes, walked off with pieces of loose leaf still attached to the bottom of their shoe. And then, twenty feet away, they noticed, and used their other foot to carelessly hold it down as they stepped off, and I cringed as I faintly heard the rip of the paper which held on it a seed for a story.
“Cynthia?” My father found me like that, crouching on the damp, grimy floor, gathering lined paper with a heavy heart. I’d been in my father’s city for all of five minutes and already wanted to turn right back around and get on the next departing train. “Need some help?”
“Hi Dad,” I said, sighing and stuffing the binder, papers still jumbled, into my backpack.
“How was your trip?” He picked at a cinder on his pinstripe jacket, and I watched it drift down to the concrete, where my binder had been only moments before.
“Alright, I guess.” I pictured the stuffy compartment with patched leather seats.
We started walking towards the nearest exit. “So, you like it here?”
“I don’t know yet.” But he didn’t hear my answer because his cell phone had rung and he’d answered it immediately, motioning that it wouldn’t take long.
Outside the station, on the sidewalks, was just as noisy as departing the train had been; I followed him, not wanting to put the hood of my sweatshirt up for fear of missing anything as I gazed at the motion around me in awe. He walked slowly, under an umbrella and concentrating more on the phone almost attached to his right ear than on passersby; but I didn’t have an umbrella, so I let myself get soaked. I heard snatches of conversation from around me blending in with my father’s deep, rolling voice.
“—Sale at Macy’s—”
“—Let’s go for coffee—”
My father: “—I can’t go for a presentation, Tom, I’ve got my daughter here—”
A street vendor caught my attention, waving sparkly purses in the air. “Miss, we have Gucci, Chanel, Louis Vuitton—”
Father had snapped his flip phone shut, and directed me away from the vendor. “I can get you a real purse, not an imitation,” he said dismissively.
My mother had very extensively drilled into me the importance of knowing where my belongings were, so I clutched my backpack tightly under an arm and rolled my suitcase close behind me, almost running over my ankles. When my father noticed this, he gave me the oddest look that translated as something like “loosen up,” and I pointedly ignored him.
He turned the key in his apartment door after a thrilling ride up a glass elevator, and opened it into his apartment, letting me wander inside while he spoke to a maid. It was quieter than the hallway, but, I noticed, putting forty-seven floors between the street and his suite didn’t quite eliminate the noise from the street. I could still hear car horns piercing the calm invoked by the rainfall this afternoon.
The rest of my visit to my father and his city progressed in discovery. My father, though spending a large majority of the time glued to his pager, still found light-hearted amusement in my response to Times Square:
“Whoa, look at the lights! That’s the biggest TV screen I’ve ever seen!”
He also had a great time taking me to various boutiques that branched off Fifth Avenue—Sak’s Fifth Avenue, Strawberry—and to other places of interest such as Liberty Island, Ellis Island, and Central Park. I found my great grandfather’s name among the thousands of other ones engraved on the wall on Ellis Island; we took a horse-carriage tour of Central Park.
By the end of the six days, my father had bought me a designer bag, as promised; a cell phone (“—They come in handy—”); and various articles of clothing. Strutting down the sidewalk beside father, him in his ironed business suit and me in my deconstructed denim shorts and lacy tank top, I felt like a true New Yorker.

*

Back in Pennsylvania, I emerged onto the platform to look for my mother and her boyfriend, pushing my new oversized sunglasses up my nose.
“Welcome home, Cynthia,” Kurt’s voice, from behind me, startled me. I turned around, folding the sunglasses and putting them into my (real) Chanel bag. He eyed my possessions with suspicion. I’d never had the reason to dislike Kurt (although, of course, as my mother’s daughter it was my job to have a small problem with every man she dated), but the way his eyes swept over my sunglasses and purse and cell phone irked me, to be completely honest. “How was your vacation?”
“Awesome,” I told them, a word I’d picked up from the girl my age that I’d met in the lobby of the Empire State Building while waiting for my father to finish work Thursday. “How were things here?”
“It was quiet,” my mother said flatly. From the way she said it, I couldn’t tell if quiet was a good thing or a bad thing.
“That’s good,” I guessed, and it was apparently the wrong answer, because she frowned and looked out at the parking lot.
The drive that followed passed quietly, and Kurt’s eyes focused on the trees lining the sides of the road, ready in case a fawn decided to chance a fatal run across the pavement; my mother, one who usually got carsick if she read in the car, was staring intensely at a book, eyes not moving.
I sighed.

*

In the weeks that followed, I visited my father in his city several more times, and each time he took me to new places, doted me on gifts and experiences. We went to concerts in Carnegie Hall (for which he had to make major phone calls in advance, telling his office he’d be unavailable for the next two or three hours), and took a tour up into the Statue of Liberty; I loved the time I spent with him.
School began again, and I was faced with forty-minute bus rides to the small school I’d attended since kindergarten, with all the same people I’d grown to know and, for the most part, despise over my years of learning there. Forty minutes seemed so grueling and pointless when I compared them to a city of instant gratification, where a twenty-minute walk or a five-minute taxi ride could get you anywhere.
And that, combined with my father’s invitation to come live with him in the city come next summer, sparked a certain amount of interest in me.
*
“Where are you going?” my mother asked. She eyed the Chanel bag I’d gotten months ago and my packed suitcase.
It was January. The roads outside were frosted over, the pavement being weakened by the constant freezing and thawing of ice and breaking; it was a Friday afternoon and I’d planned this trip for a week with my mother and my father.
“Mom,” I whined, cringing mentally as I took note of my tone of voice, “I told you I was going to visit Dad this weekend on Tuesday.”
“Well, I’m not taking you.” Mother hated when I visited Dad. Called it bad influence or something.
“I know, Travis is.” Travis was Kurt’s only son; two years older than me and he could drive! It was certainly something I looked forward to; anything to get away from the country and go somewhere more exciting.
She frowned and said nothing else.

*

“Hey Dad,” I said, finding the balding man near a pillar at the New York station, talking fast into a cell phone. He held up a hand to say that he was almost done, so I set down my bag and waited, beginning to look around at the people.
It was a good twenty minutes before he’d finished his phone call.
“Sorry about that,” he said briefly, and that was that, as if it had only been a minute of waiting, as if I hadn’t spent a third of the last hour sitting on my suitcase in utter boredom. I reached down for the beaded bag and my fingers met air. Looking down in alarm, I saw that there was nothing there.
“Shit!” I said, but Dad’s cell phone was ringing again and he didn’t look as if he’d heard me. He’d never had this many calls all in one half-hour period, and I was beginning to panic, looking at each passing person as if they were the one who’d robbed me of my belongings. I had my cell phone in there, my journal, my debit card—
“Sorry about that,” he repeated, and raised a dark eyebrow. “What’s wrong?”
“My bag. Is not here.” I let out through gritted teeth, stressing each syllable.
“I’ll get you a new one,” he said, shrugging it off.

*

My mother never really told me why she and my father had gone separate ways; she simply told me once, when I was seven or eight, that Dad and she didn’t see eye to eye on some matters. Indeed, I found myself becoming irritated with the ease with which he dismissed my missing cell phone, as my mind was suddenly inundated with thoughts of having someone steal my identity with the debit card and phone. And he continued to get those damned calls on his cell phone at the most inopportune of moments, much to my annoyance. They couldn’t be short calls, either; at the very beginning of our picnic lunch in Central Park that we’d had planned for a month he got an ‘urgent message’ and ended up glued to his phone for the next hour and fourteen minutes.
There was no other word for it than relief when I climbed into Travis’ orange Ford pickup back in my hometown and went home.

*

May came and went with my sixteenth birthday (which I spent in my father’s city, having celebrated the day prior with my mother, Kurt, and Travis), and then school let out. My father began urging me again to come live in the apartment with him.
And that was when she’d asked me. Where do you belong?
I dreaded that answer. I avoided it with everything I had in me. I spent long days driving around on the roads lining the farmland around my mother’s modest house. Finally, in the middle of June, I began spending many long hours pondering it, facing it, and found that I could come up with no real answer.
It was almost dusk that night, and I had swept my golden hair into a frizzy sort of ponytail, ready to fall apart; I impatiently brushed rogue wisps of it behind my ears as I went through my small room, dumping things into my suitcases. In went clothing I bought in my father’s city, some cherished books; then my fingers found a photograph in the bottom of my sock drawer.
It was a picture taken nearly a year and a half before; it was spring and I was fourteen, laughing in the picture with my mother, Kurt, and Travis. We’d gone to Hershey Park and had apparently just gotten off a water ride, I could tell from our soaked state. Their voices floated in from the porch below my open window, and I heard Kurt’s low thunder of a laugh under my mother’s chatting.
Shaking my head, I tucked the picture into a suitcase pocket and zipped both of my suitcases. My mother was standing in front of me, searching for an explanation, as I rolled the second one to the foyer. I swallowed a lump in my throat.
“Going to New York?” she asked.
“Yep,” I said, offering a small smile.
“Are you coming back home then?”
My face must’ve showed some sign of negativity, because her eyes changed from calculating to red and puffy, like she was holding back tears. I felt like shit as I rolled my suitcases out to the driveway, where Travis was waiting for me in his disgustingly orange Ford.
“Will you come to visit?” Kurt asked the question for my mother, who was shuddering in the doorway of the house, dabbing at her wet eyes with a frilly apron.
“Of course I will,” I said, giving another one of today’s apparently common fake smiles as I lifted my things into the back. I went and kissed her and shook Kurt’s hand.
Travis dumped a bottle of soda and a magazine out the window behind him into the back of the pickup, clearing the passenger seat for me. He backed out of the driveway when I was seated, one hand on the wheel and the other on the door, propped where the window would’ve been if it weren’t open. “Why are you going to live with your father?” he asked conversationally, as we sped away over hills, on a road sandwiched between two corn fields.
Why do I want to live in New York? I asked myself, and the feeling in my stomach, whatever it was—regret?—intensified.
Images of stoplights appeared in my mind. They turned green. I saw myself, as if from another person’s eyes, riding in the carriage attached to a horse through the green of Central Park. My father and I rode up a glass elevator to the forty-seventh floor, and I held onto his arm, both afraid it would break and amazed by the view. The mental lights changed yellow. I wandered through Macy’s, Dad trailing behind me, barking commands into his cell phone. Red. I waited forever for him to finish a call. My fingers outstretched to find not a purse, but a blank patch of floor beside me in the train depot. A picnic spent by myself, father off in another world—
“Cynthia?”
The world spun around me. I felt dizzy.
Travis had fallen into silence, following the road as the farm fields slowly transformed to trees.
“Travis?” I said, staring out the window, ten minutes later.
“Hmm?”
“Turn around.”
The car slowed to a bare thirty miles per hour. “What?”
“Turn around. I don’t want to go to New York.”
He obeyed, making a U-turn, speeding back up to fifty. He didn’t say anything, but I could see a faint smile from the side.
The ride back was spent in silence, and until we crested the hill from which we could finally see the house I’d grown up in, I’d been immersed in thoughts: had I made the right choice? Did I belong here?
At the peak of the tool shed roof next to the house was a weather vane the shape of a rooster. I never had taken notice of the old thing before now – I remembered that it had ceased to turn and point the direction of the wind after a hurricane a few years back that had caused it to rust – but now I smiled at the direction of the arrow, frozen in time, pointing indefinitely to my home.

. .

E-mail + Notes + Book + Domain + Xanga
Ara + Cera + Eloria + Marie + Shauna

Everything here is © Adrienne Wolter 2001-2007, unless otherwise noted. Do not steal, and do not be offended.
Version 14: Hurricane. Photo from freefoto, font is Hurricane.