Victor LaValle - Ecstatic

We passed a graveyard settled off the highway. Nabisase crossed herself at the four stations, but I didn’t believe in her new faith. It can’t just happen like that. One day she’s hitting our mother with a crockpot the next she’s receiving the Eucharist? This was just another way of aggravating the rest of us. She carried a plastic rosary, but the Apostolic Church of Christ wasn’t nearly Catholic. I’ll bet I knew a Hail Mary better.

My sister and I turned out such heathens I’m surprised we didn’t bubble when baptized. I observed crossing signals with more orthodoxy than the laws God gave unto Moses. Still, if Nabisase knew about my skepticism she didn’t show it. From the front passenger seat she made the sign of the cross watching the bronze and granite grave markers reflect sunlight, a field of gem-stones glittering all day.

On US-22 one sign read, Pennsylvania Welcomes You.

Getting to it felt like an accomplishment. We tapped each other’s shoulders and knees, saying, — We’re in Pennsylvania. We’re in Pennsylvania.

On our right and left fields of corn took the place of vacant grass lots. I actually pulled off the road because I was so confused. I feared that we had traveled one thousand miles in a blink and asked, — Are we still in Pennsylvania?

Mom looked out the window. I looked at her in my rearview. She had been sleeping, but was roused enough to panic.

— We’re in Pennsylvania, Nabisase said. Just look at the markers.

Thirty yards ahead there was a small black-and-white metal marker for US-22 off the shoulder. Grandma wanted to know why we stopped; Mom did too. They both asked if I was feeling sick; they asked me fourteen times. Enough that they sounded more concerned for their own safety than mine.

I drove again and never explained; it was because I thought corn was only grown in the Midwest. That in the East it came out of cans. I was just a simple, small-time city boy. A rube.

We reached Baltimore. — What exit? I asked my mother.

— None.

— I thought we were going to Maryland.

— Virginia. You don’t listen.

I had been to Baltimore once, that bipolar city. On one block was the moderately regal Penn Station, then four blocks over a quadrant of desiccated row houses. The neighborhoods went like mood swings, good to bad, horrendous to opulent, without warning.

I had been to Baltimore when an old friend was getting married.

The night before his wedding his uncles drove us to a small strip club called Eldorado’s. Even with the wonderful nudity I spent that night glum for gaining so much weight and for failing out of school. For wearing the same clothes four days straight and not showering quite as daily as people should.

One of my friends paid a woman to stand on a platform the same level as my chest and shake her ass at me for twenty minutes; a party favor. She was sweaty from working too long and her butt was cold, icy even.

She cheered me up, something she couldn’t have noticed because her back was to me the whole time. I might have started speaking to her if she’d turned around, and I guarantee she wasn’t in the mood for one more vapid compliment.

While she shook I clapped my hands right onto her ass cheeks. I put a five-dollar bill in her stocking, that kept her around. The groom-to-be had a lady upside down on his chest with her pussy dangling inches below his chin; he was so strong that when he stood up he held her there, wearing the stripper as a locket.

Eventually my dancer got wigged out by me because I didn’t caress her butt or smack it lightly or try to reach for her tits or move. I was there with my hands against her backside with my eyes closed so it looked like I was crying. I might have been.

So how bad do you have to act to make a stripper twitch? Well ‘bad’ is the wrong word because ‘bad’ is common. I could have torn her hair and she’d have understood that more; it would be well within the spectrum of a drunken male’s aggression. She got uncomfortable because sad men in strip clubs are always pathetic. It’s just that I’d seen the money in her G-string and mistook it for a collection plate. I thought I knew where I was.

— You were looking in the wrong place for that kind of thing, my mother said glumly.

The oblong sun cast daylight vigorously. I hoped she was speaking to my sister. I tried, surreptitiously, to glance at my family, but they were all watching me.

Quiet car.

Quiet car.

We were going to be late for the Miss Innocence pageant because Mom was collecting dog figurines on I-78. This trip was turning her young.

— Rest stop! Mom called.

At a Maryland gas station she bought a yellow scarf to tie around her neck. Twice already we’d watched her flirt with gas station attendants; Grandma sucked her teeth while my sister rested her limp face against the window. In warmer country Mom didn’t have to wear a dumpy coat over her airtight figure.

— Rest stop! Mom yelled again.

I parked the car and Nabisase helped Grandma walk to the bathrooms. In a minute my mother would go foraging through the rest stop gift shop for any statuette with canine features.

In the trunk we already carried a few stuffed toy dogs, a cast iron German Shepherd, a basset hound made of anthracite. Blame me for her newfound interest; I’d made the mistake of going on about how, when I was a child, I wanted a dog so much. I brought it up when the car ride went hush after my Baltimore story. I mentioned the dog idea only to blot out words like ‘stripper,’ ‘backside,’ and ‘me.’ I didn’t expect my mother to get frenzied. But she heard me blaming her for a parenting failure.

Mom stayed in the backseat while Grandma and Nabisase walked away; I touched the steering wheel where it was still cool. My mother and I were in the car looking out through the windshield.

— We’ve got enough by now, I told her gently, diplomatically.

— You said what you wanted, so I’m getting it for you.

— I was just mentioning that. To pass time, not for you to get all serious.

— I heard you. She deepened her voice, Dog! she said.

— How many words do I say in an hour? For you to focus on that one?

— You can’t have me buying you all these nice things and then get angry because I did, she said.

This rest stop was flying three flags: of the United States, Maryland and POW-MIA.

Could there still be Americans in Vietnam? I wondered if I even had the right to wonder. Those black flags with hangdog silhouette were memorials that anyone alive could own, but what good were they doing the phantoms in Cambodian cells. It’s the living who don’t release the dead. My Uncle Isaac might as well have been on this trip with us, there was room; Mom and Grandma left a space between them in the back seat.

— Again? Nabisase cried as she leaned for ward to see the car clock.

My sister had been feigning nonchalance about these stops, but now this was our seventh. Nabisase was nearly hysterical, squirming like she was churning doo-doo butter in the seat.

— I have to register, Nabisase whined. And try on my dresses.

— I know, Mom said.

— And I’ll need sleep, Nabisase continued. I probably should go to church in the morning.

When we parked only my mother left the car.

Grandma, Nabisase and I stayed. I craned my neck to rub the top of my head against the ceiling fabric. The noise it made was soothing.

Grandma reached forward and touched my sister’s neck. — We have all seen Mom acting like this before.

Nabisase slouched, half-alive. — Anthony, if you drove off now we wouldn’t mind.

I nodded to show my kinship, but knew my sister didn’t mean it. How many terrible things do people say.