324

Our childhood: a 36-foot long RV, orange kangaroo bounding across its side. Its industrial beep as Dad reverses it into our driveway, steady and slow as the RV’s roof swipes the basketball net, the vehicle so high, you need a ladder to even see the top. Mom gets to work with the Windex and vacuum, trying unsuccessfully every summer to scour the plastic odor from the RV’s insides. A mixture of bleach and mildew, of woodchip and soap. A mixture that says, “Get in.”

Lainie, Willie, and I load the laundry baskets. Swimsuits and towels, flip flops and VHS tapes, dog food, marshmallows, flashlights, and detergent. We stuff our gatherings in whatever cabinets they’ll fit in, claim our spots on the couch, the chair, the bench with no seatbelt that’s attached to the dinner table. If you get the couch, you’re lucky. The couch lets you stretch your legs as long as you’d like.

We stuff firewood into the back right outdoor compartment. Baseballs, Frisbees, footballs, bats in the compartment next to it. Throw our shoes in the drawer under the couch. Radio blasts the Chicago White Sox from the garage as we prepare our vessel. Cicadas wail like they’ve nothing left to lose. The fluorescent light from the RV intensifies as the sky grows darker. We always mean to leave on time, but where we’re going, time doesn’t matter. The open road through a stretch of summer. Enough Kraft Mac ‘n Cheese to last us a week. Everything we’d ever need corralled in our 36 x 12. The 324 square feet of us.

Five minutes until we pull out of the driveway—seriously—Dad washes bug guts and bird poop form the huge front window, wide like a giant’s eye, our communal pupil. This is how we see the world.

The door shuts, and the automatic metal steps pull themselves in. Raggs and Griffey pant as they settle on the floor. The White Sox score a tying run on the radio before we even pull out of the driveway. Dad lets out a big celebratory bellow—like the underbelly of water—his hand against the horn. Here we come! And then we’re lurching down our shady street, cabinet doors opening, the bathroom door clanging, us, the kids, getting out of our seats in a securing ritual that insures everything is in its place, right where it should be.

We trundle through our town, the ground receding behind us, the cricks and cracks of our behemoth carrier eking out at each turn—Dad at the helm, Mom, his first mate. There is a tingle at the bottom of my stomach that, even when I breathe slow, I can’t get to leave. I bet Lainie and Willie have it too. We are held and moving all at once. Do you know what that feels like?

Soon, we slide onto the on ramp, picking up speed. The white lines on the road shriek past into blurs. The RV is cruising now, smooth and grand, headed south or north or west or east.

Over and up to Maine. Fish snagged on a line. Cold Atlantic water up our noses. Rocky sand in our shoes.

South to Florida to see our grandparents. In Savannah on the way down, peach ice cream and ghost-haunted restaurants. Talk of alligators in the swampy waters of the campsite we roam way past dark. Spanish moss that feels like dust in my fingers.

Northwest to Minnesota, all five of us wearing matching t-shirts Dad made on the home printer. “Lake Itasca or Bust!” they say, small angular fish like a frame around the words. We cross the headwaters of the Mississippi on a bridge of stones, Raggs’s leash in our hands. In Wisconsin, we watch a baby cow be born, its wet face.

Further West to South Dakota. An entire palace made of corn! Buffalo as far as the eye can see! Dirt and mountain and grass and sky!

Each night, we stop. KOA campsites or Jellystone campsites or sometimes an empty Wal Mart parking lot where we can stay for free as long as we buy something in the morning. The sides of the RV slide out when we’re in “park” to give us more room, and the car grows and grows, the widening belly of our beautiful home.

At the campsites, it’s s’mores and hamburgers, mini golf courses, and general stores. Mom heats baked beans on the stove. Dad boils corn on the fire. We race with other kids we meet, up and down the small gravel roads, catching fireflies in Tupperware, swinging fishing poles towards the sound of singing frogs.

We know the transients from the permanents, people who live here all year long, and who have whole lawns in front of their RVs, garden gnomes, signs hand painted with their last names, and rock gardens that leave dents in the earth.

We, too, settle in, unfurling our awning over the front door. Pulling out the piece of astro turf from the under compartment to spread near the campfire, setting lawn chairs in a circle around the flame. But we will not stay like the permanents. We are on the road—explorers, travelers, destined to keep moving. There is too much still out there to see.

Sometimes, after dinner, after we hand wash our dishes in the sink, and Dad makes JiffyPop over the fire, after the stars have come out, and the 10 pm quiet hour arrives so that you can finally hear the crickets and the distant hum from the highway against the fire’s cracking, Mom gets on the bed.

“Dance!” we say. “Dance!” And she does—standing on the full mattress she and Dad share that takes up the entire back of the RV. She turns her neck so her head doesn’t hit the ceiling. And then her hips are wiggling and her head is back, she’s moving her hands across her face like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, knees bent and about to spring. We’re cracking up, and she is, too. She looks at Dad, smiles, and rolls her eyes like flirting, like she thinks we’re ridiculous, as she sways her hips. The five of us crammed into the back of the car, hollering and laughing, her full, tan calves at my eyes, her gorgeous painted toes. The four of us cheering for her and whooping. Our star.

In an hour, after the show is over and Dad turns the lights off, we can hear him brushing his teeth in the small bathroom. He’s folded down the kitchen table and turned it into a bed for Willie. The couch has slid out into a bed for me. Lainie has turned the bucket seat and the passenger seat towards each other to form her bed, sheets on everything, the green ones we use only in the RV.

“Goodnight, kiddly bumps,” my dad says once he slides from the small bathroom.

“Goodnight, my babies,” Mom calls from their bed.

“Goodnight,” we say back in varying degrees of almost asleep, but my eyes stare at the ceiling. We’re in Kansas or Connecticut or Tennessee. We are nowhere but here, in our 324.

Five so close I could reach out my hand and practically touch each one.

***

In the last spring of our mother's life, three weeks after her fifty-third birthday and three months before she dies, after the family summer trips have come and gone—school schedules and jobs and splitting lives—the drawers of the RV empty, the linoleum grout grayer, the dull scent of bleach and woodchip and dust, my dad will drive her to my brother's college baseball game in Iowa. He’s the starting pitcher. She refuses to miss a game, even with her disappearing bones, even in thirty-degree air. She cannot remove herself from the mother of her.

Dad drives her five hours in the RV and parks it near the outfield. That way, she can escape to the bed any time she needs to. My mother, in her fur hat and wig, shrinking the way cancer does to a body. She watches a strike three from the automatic stairs of the RV, metal and plastic and heart, eyes wide at her baby boy, gloved hand clutching the handle of her chariot. Ours.

The ways it carried us.