Knox
There’s so much to say about what we’ve seen that we’re silent all the way to the van. Inside, Sylvie asks, “Can you pull up Maps on my phone?” and then we look at each other.
You told Sylvie you wanted to attach yourself to a girl with a map. You oaf—way to leak the contents of your brain everywhere.
“You wanted to attach yourself to a girl with a map, huh?” Sylvie says, like she’s reading my mind. “Here’s a map, barnacle.” There’s an impish lilt in her voice.
“I mean.”
We’re back on the road, headed south.
“Is it a seafaring lass you seek, Knox? A pirate queen? You looking for your very own Anne Bonny?”
“How do you know about Anne Bonny?”
“You say that like you know about Anne Bonny.”
“I do from reading old-timey ship novels for dads. How do you know who she is?”
“From watching Black Sails when I was way too young. Pirates had sort of a moment there in the zeitgeist.”
“They were always pretty well respected in the circles I grew up in.” What I kept to myself: there was a lot of esteem in particular for the stealing and doing whatever you wanted.
“You gonna sing Map Girl some sea shanties? By the way, do shanties come in any flavor but sea?”
“They must because otherwise it would be redundant to say ‘sea shanty.’”
“I’d like to see someone drop a sick dance shanty.”
“A baby-making shanty.”
“Spicy! Getting a little Knox After Dark here.”
“Talking about dropping pants like you drop an anchor.”
“Ew, no. On second thought, I don’t think I care to hear a baby-making shanty.”
“Something about all hands on deck.”
“Knox!”
“Raising the—”
“I deeply regret suggesting the existence of alternate shanty-verses. So, for a very welcome change of subject: What was your favorite part of House on the Rock? And if you steer us back to the subject of shanties by saying the Heritage of the Sea exhibit, I’m leaving you by the side of the highway. ”
“‘Steer us back to Shantytown’ was right there, Sylvie. Right there.”
She smacks the steering wheel. “I blew it.”
“That’s going in the baby-making shanty.”
“No it is not. And I’m now looking for a safe place to pull off.”
“Okay, okay, I did love Heritage of the Sea but my favorite was the Japanese garden.”
“Really.”
“Yeah.”
“How come?”
“Because before now I’d see stuff like that and it would bum me out that I’d never get to see a place like Japan.”
“And now?”
“My life feels more my own. Like it’s imbued with more possibility.”
“Imbued.”
“Sorry, it was the only word that sprang to mind,” I say.
“Don’t apologize; I love the way you talk with these random fancy words that people read and write but never say.”
“So anyway. Yeah. It feels way more likely now that I’ll get to see a real Japanese garden someday.”
“Aw.”
“Well don’t make fun of me.”
Sylvie gasps. “I’m so not. Here, I’ll say it again in a more sincere tone. Aw. Better?”
“Okay, that one I believed. But I mean, even that Japanese garden wasn’t the sort of experience I normally got to have growing up.”
“Because? Mom was anti-Japanese garden? Not over World War Two?”
“Just didn’t have the funds. We always barely scraped by and survived. So if it wasn’t free we didn’t do it.” Or if we couldn’t sneak in or steal it, but I didn’t say that. “The funny thing—not haha funny—is that our lack of money was always presented to me as some higher form of freedom.”
“And you obviously disagree.”
“Look at the situation I’m in. Without you and without money, what choices would I have?
I’d either be trying to hitchhike or hop trains down to North Carolina with one broken arm, or I’d be trying to work and make enough money for a bus ticket with said bum arm.
None of those are great choices. Here’s an observation. ”
“Lay it on me.”
“If you live in America, you can either be totally fine physically and be okay or you can have lots of money and be okay but if you’re missing both, you’re gonna have a real bad time.”
“Yeah, I guess that’s true.” Sylvie’s quiet for a long while. “But it’s also a two-edged sword.”
“How so?”
“Because your mom was right to some extent. There’s truth to the idea that money can be its own set of shackles.”
“I’m listening.”
“The more money you have, the more you obsess about losing it. Your lifestyle expands so that the stakes are higher. You forget how to do with less, which is a loss of freedom. You start having trouble knowing who you can trust because anyone could have an ulterior motive for getting close to you. And even having just a little bit more than someone else puts a target on your back. I mean, that was me getting assaulted by Harley Quinn and her boyfriend back where we met. People always trying to scam you. Have you ever seen the stats on lottery winners?”
“No.”
“It’s some wildly high percentage of them that have terrible problems after winning.
Their families fall apart and they invest in all sorts of cockamamie schemes and everyone comes out of the woodwork wanting something from them and after, like, five years, they’re worse off than they were before. A lot of them even die.”
“Well that sucks.”
She says, “It does, yeah. It’s basically the most perfect real-life manifestation of ‘be careful what you wish for.’”
“Or ‘the grass is greener on the other side of the street.’”
“Or ‘wake up and smell the roses.’”
“Wait, how is it that?”
Sylvie shrugs. “It isn’t. But we’re saying expressions and I used to have a teacher who said that because he was always mixing up expressions and it always cracked us up.”
“It’s ‘wake up and smell the coffee’; ‘stop and smell the roses,’ right?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, I was questioning myself.”
“We laughed because it’s funny to imagine someone waking you up with a bouquet of roses, like, ‘hey wake up and smell these roses. I got you these instead of coffee.’”
“No, yeah, it’s funny. Did he say ‘stop and smell the coffee’?”
“Not that I can recall, but you know who could stand to stop and smell—and indeed even drink—the coffee now that you mention it?” Sylvie turns on her blinker.
“Yeah, I gotta pee super bad.”
She exits the freeway and starts to pull into a Conoco.
Something about it . . . my heart seizes, like an engine run dry of oil.