The Place Where I Come From

By Laura J. N. Dawson

"We drove through New Jersey, through Philadelphia and Wilmington. The land got flatter and flatter, more and more sandy. As we headed south on Route 13, the houses and shopping malls gave way to fields of soybeans and corn. We were almost out of Delaware when the fan belt broke."

Milton, Delaware - a town at the Southern tip of the Delmarva Peninsula - is very flat, very sandy, and very small. "The Place Where I Come From" portrays the lives of small-town inhabitants just before the Internet became prevalent, in the 1970s and 1980s.

Influenced by Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg Ohio", "The Place Where I Come From" is a precise depiction of a particular place in a particular time - when isolation and stillness haunted the lives of a small, rural town.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Laura J. N. Dawson
• Release date: Aug 7, 2013
• ISBN: 9780989497701

Laura J. N. Dawson

I live in Staten Island with my boyfriend Bernardo. I have always worked in the book industry – in my latest incarnation I am Product Manager for Identifiers at Bowker. Everything else (number of children living at home, pets) is subject to change.

Book preview

1

Florida

Five miles out of Newton, I was thoroughly sick of Stephen. If I’d had my way, Stephen and I wouldn’t have even been together. That was the point, my doing this alone. I’d just graduated from college, and I wanted to travel before getting tied down to a job. I wanted to go from Newton, Iowa to New York City, and then to Florida. But, since I’m the only child in my family, and a girl at that, my mother said if I wanted to go anyplace, I had to take a man with me, preferably Stephen, whom I’d known all my life.

First of all, Stephen insisted on driving. Now, this was my car and my trip, and I thought I’d made all that perfectly clear to him before we started out, but he only said, "I’ve been in a car with youbefore," and stuck to the wheel like he was welded to it. The car itself was something else. It was a 1972 Pontiac, which I’d had since the eleventh grade, which my mother had had before me and which she hoped would break down somewhere on the road, forcing us to forego the entire trip and fly back home. It was a clunky thing with poor shocks, but it had a real nice 350 engine, which you don’t find in any cars anymore, and it had terrific pickup. So I was all set for a great, if bumpy ride-except Stephen was driving.

And arguing. I had thought that once I convinced him to come with me, he would come quietly, but this was not the case. Stephen did not want to be in that car with me, travelling across the country.

One month, I said, as we headed for Toledo, which was our first stop. Three days to get from here to New York, a week in New York, three days to get from NewYork to Florida, two weeks in Florida-

This trip is costing me, he said, gripping the steering wheel. We were going the speed limit, exactly fifty-five, and cars were passing us all around.

Three hundred, total. Look, I’m even paying for your food.

It’d be cheaper if you didn’t go to New York, he said.

"But I want to go to New York! That’s the point!"

It’d be more efficient if you went straight to Florida. He was nodding at the road; he had big blue eyes that more often than not got completely on my nerves. My mother, of course, loved his eyes.

Stephen, can you hear me? I spoke slowly and loudly. I said, I want to go to New York. That’s part of the trip. And if you don’t want to go with me, you have my blessing to take the next plane back home.

I promised your mother, he muttered. I leaned back in my seat and closed my eyes.

Stephen and I were next-door-neighbors; he was two months younger than me, and he was Mama’s little pride and joy (both his mama and mine). When we were little kids, I took it as my bounden duty to toughen him up, sending him to get the baseballs that landed on the other side of the muddy ditch in the middle of Preston Field, telling him that the ditch was a direct and express avenue to the underworld itself. Stephen never fell in, unfortunately. But every half-hour he would go inside and put on clean clothes. That was the kind of guy Stephen was at age six. At age twenty-two, he hadn’t changed. That was the kind of guy I was travelling with: an honor-bound, self-righteous do-gooder with an anti­-dirt fetish.

When we got to Toledo, I ate something in the hotel that made me break out in hives. So I was stuck in this hotel room, in underwear because clothes rubbed too much against my skin - I lay in bed with the sheet pulled up because Stephen wouldn’t leave. I kept trying to get him out so I could get up and let my skin circulate. Toledo’s a nice town, I told him, but he shook his head and said, It’s all grey and dirty and gross.

So I said, If you don’t leave, these damn things won’t ever get better. But he just read Guideposts and wouldn’t talk to me. And I took baths in cornstarch, which I made him go out and get for me, and rubbed Vaseline Intensive Care all over for three days until the hives faded and we could get moving again.

He wouldn’t speak to me in the car, either.

Look, I said, it’s not my fault I got hives.

You could’ve got them at horne.

I restrained myself from strangling him, and just shut up and thought about the two cases of Bud I’d sneaked into the back seat, covered up with blankets. Stephen thought they were boxes of laundry detergent, the big economy-size boxes, which he’d asked me to get. I knew there’d be problems when we hit New York, which would probably be the dirtiest place Stephen had ever set foot in in all his twenty-two years, and he had nothing to wash his clothes in but two cases of Bud.

I amused myself with this thought until we hit Pittsburgh. That night at the hotel, Stephen said, We’ve lost a lot of time what with your hives. Are you sure you want to go to New York?

I couldn’t believe it, I just could not believe it. I dropped the Glamour I was reading, and I said, Look. This is my trip. I planned it, I’m paying for most of it, and I put a lot of work into it. You knew we were going to New York from the outset, and if you don’t like it, you can go home.

Which, of course, he didn’t do.

But he did let me drive into New York the next day, over the bridge and down Riverside Drive, over to East Fortieth, where our hotel was. We put the car in the parking garage, Stephen grumbling about the money, and we went up to the room, where he immediately whipped the blanket off the beer. Then his face got red.

Jasmine-

It was the first time I’d ever seen him really mad, and I almost laughed out loud, except I knew it would only make things worse. So I grabbed his hand and dragged him out of the hotel. It took the nineteen blocks to Central Park until he calmed down enough to notice the pigeons, the homeless guys, the horseshit, and the garbage, andthen he started up again. Is this what you wanted to come to New York for? Is this why I’m going to be here a week? A week in all this shit? We spent an hour walking around Central Park, and he never shut up. I was trying to watch the horse carriages, and the homeless guys rolling around, and the kids everywhere. There was a concert in one big field, and big statues of Alice in Wonderland, Hans Christian Anderson, and Peter Rabbit in another part of the park. I tried to get Stephen to take pictures of me, or at least pose for pictures himself, but of course he wouldn’t. As soon as we left the park and went back to the hotel, he stopped in a store and bought two big boxes of Tide.

Stephen spent most of the time in the hotel. I went shopping, visited the Empire State Building, the World Trade Center, Ellis Island, and the Statue of Liberty. I went to the Met, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim. I went to plays and movies and concerts down in the Village. I did all this while Stephen stayed in the hotel and did laundry and read paperbacks I bought for him. When we left New York, he drove out like he couldn’t get out fast enough.

We drove through New Jersey, through Philadelphia and Wilmington. The land got flatter and flatter, more and more sandy. As we headed south on Route 13, the houses and shopping malls gave way to fields of soybeans and corn. We were almost out of Delaware when the fan belt broke.

You had to make this trip, Stephen said, as we pulled into a gas station near a sign that said, "Milton: If you lived here, you’d be home now."

It’s an old car, I said. We’re lucky it didn’t break down completely.

Then at least we could’ve gone home.

You can still go, I told him. I went over to the gas station attendant.

Is there a hotel here? I said.

He pointed to a sandy lot across the highway, behind which was a very unimpressive weatherbeaten one-story building with a dingy sign next to it: Milton’s Sunrise Hotel.

I picked up my bag and started over. A few steps behind me, Stephen was snarling to himself. When we checked in, I took a shower and put on a dress. I’m going to get something to eat, I said. You coming?

He shook his head. I shrugged, slammed the door as I went out.

I walked downtown, past three churches and a factory, to a place called the Red Rail Lounge. The parking lot was filled with pickup trucks, and inside the restaurant were men in tee-shirts and dirty jeans, most of whom leered at me when I came in. I frowned back at them and got myself a burger and a Bud. A couple of guys tried to get me to dance, but they were greasy and sweaty, soaking through their tee-shirts, and most of them hadn’t shaved in about three weeks. I left before anything terrible could happen, and it was only ten o’clock whenI got back to the motel. I took another shower and got in my bed.

How I was supposed to put up with Stephen in Florida, I had no idea. He was going to want to drive the whole way down, and he’d complain about the sand everywhere, and the heat. He wouldn’t do tourist things because they were too tacky, but he wouldn’t try anything else.

He’d just sit in the hotel, grumbling about all the sand I tracked in, scolding me when I picked anyone up, doing excessive loads of laundry.

Finally, at eight o’clock that morning, I decided I wasn’t going to put up with it anymore. I got up, dressed, grabbed my suitcase and left the motel while Stephen slept. I walked over to the gas station and paid for the car repair. Then I tossed my bag in the back seat, got in the driver’s seat, and pulled out onto Route 13, headed for Florida.

2

Better or Worse

I haven’t! I said.

But he threw me against the living room wall and tore my dress and broke my jaw. I lay in the hospital while they wired it shut, knowing that the only person that was going to come charging to my rescue was me.

At first I thought I’d do it with the kitchen knife while he was asleep, but the thought of crunching that steel through all that bone and gristle just set my teeth on edge. You would have thought that as macho as he was, he would have had a gun. If he’d had a gun, killing him would have been as neat and easy as stepping on a cockroach.

But he didn’t, so when I got home I just drank my dinner through a straw and didn’t say a word.

Eddie wasn’t like this in high school.

He was smarter than me, but during my sophomore year there was a mistake in the guidance office and a bunch of college-prep people got put in my social studies class. Eddie was blond and green-eyed, and the first time Miss Cochran called on him was when she wanted to know what a caste system was.

It’s when you’re born into a class, and you can never move out of it, he said. But when you die, you can get reincarnated, and you move up into a higher class.

The whole class was quiet; Miss Cochran smiled.

We used to live in India, Eddie said. He shrugged. My dad was in the Navy. He looked over at me. I smiled at him, and he started writing in his notebook and the back of his neck got red.

But the next time he looked at me, he didn’t look away, and after class he asked me about the homework, and then later that week he called me, and before I knew it we were going out. He showed me his social studies notebook, and the only thing he had in it was Ellie in all kinds of handwriting.

He and I went out for two and a half years. He was editor of the yearbook, and every day after school I met him in the office and welooked at layouts and pictures. His best friend Paul was editor of the school paper and would stop by on his way to meetings. Sometimes his other best friend John would stop by on his way toband practice. Paul and John usually ignored me when I was around, and they never joked with me the way they joked with Angela Mencken, who was president of the student council. She had pimples and stringy hair, and she never laughed.

I hated homework and I hated reading. About the only thing I was good at was my Junior Accounting class.

Eddie said he liked me because I didn’t talk about myself the way most girls did.

I didn’t have much to talk about. I went to school, then to my job at Irene’s Clothes Shop, then home to fix dinner before Mom got in from working at Dr. Robinson’s office.

When Eddie and I went out, he talked about how he and his friends used to go running around in the hills in Scotland and scare all the sheep, and who he thought were the greatest men in