E. Doctorow - Loon Lake

“Sandy,” he said, “let’s get married.”

She hugged him until he thought the truck would go off the road.

“We don’t want a new start, Sandy, we want a new life. A whole new life. When we get to California. Okay? That’s the place.”

She was more than amenable. “Oh my, oh my,” she said, hugging the baby. “You hear that, darlin? We’re gonna have a proper daddy. Yes we are! Oh my!”

There followed a period of solemn discussion. I explained that to make a true marriage we both had to shuck the ways of our old lives, its attitudes, its assumptions. “I know I won’t be able to live a road life anymore,” I said. “I know I have to plan to make something of myself. And I have ideas, Sandy, a man can do a lot starting from a small investment. More than one fortune has been made that way, I can tell you.”

She nodded.

“So I know I’ve got to give up my past life and I want you to think about giving up yours. Do you ask in what way?”

“Yes sir.”

“In the way of style, Sandy honey. In the way of more ambition of style. Now, take this truck for instance. They stop trucks like this by the hundreds at the California state line. They don’t want people coming in looking like Okies, you know? In fact I’ve read if you can’t prove you have a job waiting they won’t even let you in.”

“This truck is bad?”

“Very bad.”

“But how else we gonna move the furniture and all?”

“Ah, well, the furniture, that’s the next thing I want to talk to you about.”

An hour later we were in a fair-sized town east of Albuquerque, New Mexico. There was a big junk store at the edge of town. Sandy and I stood with our luggage in the dusty street while the furniture was unloaded. A man scrawled a big number in chalk on each piece or tied a tag to its leg. Sandy watched her chair and sofa, her big Philco radio disappear into the darkness of the store. I patted her shoulder.

It was cold and very sunny. The man counted out sixty dollars into my hand.

“Where’s there a used-car lot?” I said to him. He walked around the truck, looking it up and down. He leaned his weight on the lowered tailgate. “I’ll take it off your hands,” he said. “Not worth much, though.”

I got seventy-five dollars for the truck, for which I had paid a hundred in Jacksontown. Twenty-five dollars to transport us across six states didn’t seem at all bad.

I tied two of Sandy’s bags with rope and slung them over my good shoulder. I held another valise under my good arm and a fourth in my good hand. Sandy carried the baby and the remaining bag and, slowly, and with many halts, we shuffled several blocks to the railroad depot. It was a small station on the Santa Fe line and in a couple of hours a train was coming through to Los Angeles.

I checked the bags and took my wife-and-baby-to-be across the street to a diner and left them there. I found a barbershop a few blocks away. The barber removed my bandages and pulled out the stitches. He shaved me and gave me a haircut. He gave me a hot towel.

Then I had an idea. I stopped in a drugstore. My cast was supposed to be on for six weeks, but it was a torment. The druggist did the job as several customers looked on.

I was shocked my my pale thin arm. The break had been down toward the wrist. My fingers ached when I tried to move them. But it was good to be rid of the weight of all that plaster and to sport instead a couple of splints and adhesive tape.

To celebrate I stopped in a haberdasher’s and bought a dark suit with a vest and two pairs of pants. Eighteen dollars. The tailor did up the cuffs for me on the spot. I bought a white shirt and a blue tie for three-fifty. Even my old khaki greatcoat looked good after the man brushed it and put the collar down. “Wear it open,” he said, “so the suit shows.”

Sandy didn’t recognize me when I walked back into the diner.

“Is that you?”

“It’s either me or George Raft,” I said.

The idea was coming clear to her. We still had an hour before the train arrived. She took one of her bags from the check-in and repaired to the ladies’ room.

I remember that depot: it had wooden strip wainscoting and a stove and arched windows caked with chalk dust. I sat on the bench with Baby Sandy and held her on my lap. I felt her life as she squirmed to look at this or that. She wore a wool cap from which hair of the lightest color peeked through. I untied the string under her chin and pushed back the hat and it seemed to me now the hair was more red than I remembered. It seemed to me too as we regarded each other that her facial structure was changing and the father was beginning to show. “Oh, that would be a shame,” I said aloud. She grabbed my tie in her fist.

And then I looked up and standing there Sandy James in a dress of Clara’s and hose and Clara’s high-heeled shoes. She was looking at the floor and holding her arms out as if she were on a high wire. Her face was flushed, she dropped her bag and grabbed hold of the bench.

“I’m fallin!” she said with a shriek.

“You’re not falling,” I said.

She had combed her hair back and put on lipstick a little bit crooked. She wore a coat open over the dress I hadn’t seen it before it was creased but it was fine a dark creased coat not originally hers any more than the dress or the shoes, but it looked fine, it all looked fine.

She was awaiting judgment with mouth slightly open eyes wide.

“Aw, Sandy,” I said, “you look swell. Oh honey, oh my, yes.” And she broke into smiles, glowing through her freckles, her pale eyes crescented behind her cheekbones in a great face of pleasure, and there was our life to come in the sun of California — all in the beaming presence she made.

And so we sat waiting for our train, this young family, who would know what we had come from and through what struggle? We were an establishment with not a little pride in ourselves and the effect we made in the world. I thought of a bungalow under palm trees, something made of stucco with a red tile roof. I thought of the warm sun. I imagined myself driving up to my bungalow in the palm trees, driving up in an open roadster and tooting the horn as I pulled up to the curb.

A while later an interesting thing happened. The Stationmaster told us through the gate that the famous Super Chief was coming through from Los Angeles. We went out on the platform to watch it go by on the far track. And after a minute it thundered by, two streamlined diesel engines back to back, and cars of ridged shiny silver with big windows. It shook the station windows with its basso horn, and a great swirl of dirt flew into our eyes. It was going fast but we could see flashes of people in their compartments.

Sandy grabbed my arm: “You see her! It’s her, omigod, oh, she looked right at me!”

A moment later the train was gone and I stood watching it get smaller and smaller down the track. “Didn’t you see her?” Sandy asked. “Oh, what’s her name! Oh, you know that movie star, you know who I mean! Oh, she’s so beautiful?”

It was true, the Stationmaster said a few minutes later, you could get a glimpse of Hollywood stars every day, east and west, as the Super Chief and the Chief went by. But he wouldn’t know in particular which one we had seen. “Oh, you know,” Sandy kept saying to me. “You know who it is!” She stamped her foot trying to remember.

I had thought it was Clara. I laughed at myself and lit a cigarette, but long afterward something remained of the moment and located itself in my chest, some widening sense of loss, some heartsunk awareness of the value I once placed on myself.

The cars were crowded, valises and trunks piled near the doors at each end, bags and bundles stuffed in the overhead racks. We found a place toward the rear of one overheated car and we settled ourselves. We sat stiffly in recognition of the established residence of the other passengers. The car gave off the smell of orange peel and egg salad. People wore slippers instead of shoes, they slept covered with their own blankets and they chatted with each other like neighbors. Children ran up and down the aisle.