Westward/Eastward/Westward Ho

                                    

                                          
Fortunately, Mama, Daddy, Dougie, Gladys, and I had much better luck in getting to actual California.
                          
Daddy took a red-eye, stand-by, to Albuquerque. The rest of us tried to nap in the airport, waiting for him, while our doctored-up Impala slept in the long term parking lot; it was still recovering from transmission surgery. By the time Daddy arrived with his two small suitcases full of summer-weight clothes and presumably no Prospects, Mama was pacing, Dougie was cranky, Gladys's hair had fallen down in a dead faint, and all of us had begun to really feel our sunburns, which were as tomato-red as my pajamas. (My pajamas, which I was still wearing.)
                          
Daddy had slept a few hours on the flight, so we all piled right into the car and he drove. There was no money for a hotel room, especially after paying for transmission surgery and a plane ticket.
                          
Dougie and Gladys fell asleep. Mama and Daddy talked. But their conversation lurched from forward to neutral to reverse, and kept stalling out. Mama would say she was sorry; Daddy would say he was sorry. They'd say they missed each other. Then they'd go right back to disagreeing. Mama and Daddy were always like that—they were usually in the wrong gear. It was rough on the transmission of their relationship.
                          
Did I mention that this was not the first time Mama had left Daddy? Not the first time at all. In fact, she had already left him five or six times that I knew of, and keep in mind that I was only four. She usually didn't take us with her, though; she'd go alone to the grocery store or the post office and would take a few days to come home. Then, when we asked her why she'd been gone so long, she'd sit us kids down and explain that she was just having a bit of trouble finding herself, that's all. (This had always perplexed me because whenever I got lost, I was the only thing I could find with any certainty.)
                          
The gears Mama and Daddy were shifting between that morning were whether to go home, or continue west. Daddy thought it was a reckless, crazy idea to go to California. Mama countered that no one but Gladys had any possible Prospects, since Daddy had lost his job again, and Dougie was "his father's son" (whatever that meant), and since her own Prospects had been ruined by having Dougie in the first place.
                          
Dougie and Gladys were both asleep, so their opinions about California were not counted. Nor were mine. I was only four, so my opinions, considered to be not fully formed yet, were never counted.
                          
Every time Daddy thought he had definitively won the battle, he turned the car around and headed east. But Mama was determined. She'd let Daddy think he'd won, and then catch him off guard with a surprise snipe. "God-dangling sugar fungus," Daddy would mutter angrily. (I know he doesn't sound very angry, it's just that he'd been expletively impaired from too many years around us kids.) Daddy would then have to concede and turn the car back towards California until he thought of a better point to argue. So the car kept circling on the desert road (or rather, ovaling) as if testing out a racetrack, and Gladys and Dougie kept sliding into me at each U-turn, and I watched the Western/Eastern/Western sky before us change from dawn to darkness and dawn once again. And I thought: Maybe this is where wagon trains first got the idea to circle. Not from Indians attacking, but from everyone arguing whether California was becoming a bad idea.