The Cloverleaf Story

 

My hands were shaking, a definite vibrato tremble that said sensitive, high-strung, a nervous wreck. I wove my fingers together and rested my hands in my lap. Now the hands shook together instead of independently. 

I unwove my fingers, turned my hands palm down, and pressed one hand onto each thigh. Since my legs were shaking too, the effect was a coffee cup rattling on top of a washing machine in its spin cycle. 

But I didn't need to do all this work. She wasn't looking my way. How could she? She was trying to steer while peering through a frosty smudge about as big as a silver dollar pancake. The rest of the windshield was layered in fat puffy snow.

A whining sound that cut into my ears leaked through the closed window in the passenger door. I turned my head an inch and slanted my gaze over. There was a truck-trailer whizzing next to us, I mean next to us, grinding up the snowy road ahead and spewing gray frozen slush behind. I turned my head the other way. Through the driver's window I saw a van with a heating contractor's logo on its side plowing through the wet slush in the left-hand lane. The three of us -- car, van, and semi--  glided scarily around a curve in the cloverleaf, inches apart, wet tires loose in the snow and slush and water. 

A little noise of panic escaped from my throat. I swallowed it down, but it came back up as a rapid sentence. "I can't stand it," I said. 

Well, she'd found out. How long did I think I was going to be able to pass myself off as a normal person? Above-normal, really, since she'd insisted as seeing me as wonderful and I didn't want to be a disappointment. Now the truth had been centrifuged out as we spun around the cloverleaf. I was a coward, and a sensitive, high-strung, nervous wreck of a coward to boot. 

She needed to be at work in the morning, and that's why we were out in the cold dark, speeding through the snowstorm. But I really couldn't stand it. When I say I couldn't stand it, I meant that I couldn't stand it. Not fifty more miles of this, zooming in a light-duty pickup, sprayed at close range with muddy slush from two directions. 

She didn't turn to look at me, but I knew she'd heard me because, when the truck came to a stop light, she put on the signal to turn left.  The friendly bright rectangular sign of a budget motel shone from across the double set of highway lanes. 

"I can't make it that far," I was forced to say by my upset stomach. To get into friendly territory, we'd have to make the turn across lanes of cars and trucks and buses through white air speckled with tiny snow particles, off which headlights just bounced away. "Can we go to this one?" I used a tiny movement of my right hand to indicate a Motor Hall. The Motor Hall was on my side of the road, one easy turn to the right and we'd be in the lot. 

The clerk at the desk thought we were a shady-looking pair. Where was our luggage? her face asked. Why was one of us so grim-looking and the other so pale and trembly? I wanted to say have a heart, it's a blizzard, listen we wouldn't stay here if we had any choice. 

But I signed the book and dug in my jeans pocket for loose bills and spare change. Between us we had forty-nine dollars and sixty cents. The price for a single night's stay was forty-nine dollars and fifty cents. If I'd dropped one of my dimes and it had rolled down a heat vent in the lobby, I was sure the clerk would have turned us out into the storm, or worse yet, allowed us to stay under the burden of ten cents' worth of charity. 

For all the money we had, we got a big square motel bed, a blonde laminate dresser polished to an ugly waxy gloss, and a television on which we could choose any of twenty-four channels. We laid down without bothering to turn down the bedspread, side by side and stiff like miserable corpses. She put her forearm over her eyes, a gesture I'd learned to recognize as a sign of wretchedness. After a couple of minutes I sat up, scooted to the end of the bed, and leaned over to pull out the "On" knob on the TV. 

I clicked through the options, looking for an old movie, but all the channels were loud and ugly. I pushed the knob back in and the blaring light was sucked back into the void from whence it came. 

I scooted back up the bed, toward the headboard, wrinkling the bedspread on my side into ridges which humped up under my back when I laid back down. 

"We'll think this is funny tomorrow," I said.

"Hmm," she said as all patient spouses answer us when we are tiresome and don't know it. 

I rolled over on my side but was too self-aware to expect sleep. Lying that way resulted in an uneasy wash of acid in my stomach, which was unpleasant enough that I knew I'd have to get up. Sighing, I kicked my legs out, twisted them down onto the floor, sat up, then stood up. 

I searched the drawers of the shiny dresser first, finding nothing, then I opened the top drawer of the bedside table. The only thing in it was a postcard showing the parking lot of a place called The Dusty Diner in Palo Alto, California. I flipped the postcard over. On the message side, ballpoint pen message from a dutiful traveler: Dear Folks, Calif. is really nice. Bill and I are going out to eat tonite at this restar -- " The writer had attempted to squeeze a "u" between the "a" and "r," realized the futility of it, and stopped. 

I laid the postcard on top of the bedside table, picture side up, and opened the second drawer. Lying docilely at the bottom were four crisp but aged sheets of Motor Hall stationery.  

I turned toward the bed and started to say, "Hey, have you got a pen?" but I realized as I began that she might have found a way to sleep. She was generally able to spread a little tent of tranquility wherever she came to rest. The "Hey" was all that erupted from me. I turned it into an unconvincing cough, to which she did not react. 

I walked over to my jacket, heaped in the seat of a chair, and hunted around in the pockets till I found a golf pencil left over from a library visit. 

I stood next to the glossy dresser, using the top as a desk, and drew golf-pencil cartoons of two miserable women trapped in an ugly motel. When she woke up I'd show the cartoons to her.

 By the time I'd used up the last sheet of stationery -- the last cartoon showed us comically kneeling to kiss the oil-stained concrete of our own driveway -- my stomach had reached a reasonable pH level. I sat down on the edge of the bed, unlaced my sneakers and set them, one at a time, on the floor , checking between the the first shoe and the second to make sure my little rustle and bumping noises weren't waking her. 

The new desk clerk -- a young man  -- called at five a.m. as we'd asked. I got out of bed first, went into the bathroom to pee, then went to the window and lifted a corner of the curtain to peek outside. The room was still dark so I could see out into the pre-down shadowy parking lot. The snow had not only stopped falling, but had mostly melted away, leaving a few white icy lumps which glittered in the light thrown down by the tall light pole next to the Motor Hall sign. 

After quick showers we were in the car by twenty minutes after five. The truck started on the first turn of the key and we must have left the radio on because a cello's broad tone poured evenly from the dashboard speakers. 

After I got my seatbelt fastened, I noticed there was a wad of green paper near my tennis shoe. I bent down, straining against the shoulder strap, to pick the paper up and put it into the litter bag. She hated trash in her new truck. Then I noticed a President's white curled wig, and after a bit of unwadding, I spread the pieces of paper out with the pad of my thumb. 

"Hey,"  I said, happily, "here's one, two, three, four dollars!"

"Coffee?" she said, looking as though there was once again a reason to be alive. She put the lever into Drive and we pulled across the parking lot to a small sign with an arrow pointing out toward the highway. Under a cartoon sunrise that looked like the one on the Raisin Bran cereal box, the sign said "Enjoyed Your Stay? Please Visit Us Again!" 

"It wasn't horrible," I said. 

"No. It wasn't," she said. 

The six lanes of highway which had been so intimidating the evening before were now, at this early hour, nearly empty and shiny with melted snow. The sun wasn't up yet, but there was a hint of color along the eastern horizon, where a glowing sign for a Hardee's gave us a come hither. 

We were the third vehicle in line at the rive-thru when it opened at five-thirty. We each had a grease-heavy biscuit with ham, cheese, and a perfect disc of egg in the middle. And big coffees. I used my thumb and finger to extract the ham slice from my sandwich and held the ham wiggly in the air. "Want this?"

She smiled and opened her mouth and I put the slice in between her teeth. She drove like that for a minute, grinning at me around the brown circle before handing me her coffee cup so she could open her sandwich onto the paper wrapper next to her leg. She laid in the extra ham and re-assembled the sandwich. 

The truck was at the Hardee's exit onto the highway and the early-morning commuter behind us honked. "All right already," she said through a mouthful of breakfast biscuit, and then she pulled out onto the highway. 

As I gave her back her coffee, I looked to see if the honking had started us off in a bad way. No. She had breakfast and coffee she'd thought she'd have to drive home without, and she was happy. It was going to be a good ride home.