Crossroads

Abstract

Crossroads Jocelyn Bartkevicius (bio) We fly out of my father's dirt driveway, fishtailing onto Transylvania Road, race right down the middle. I grip the seat of my father's Chevy pickup, anticipating the long trek over winding, hilly, dangerous country roads. By now, my mother sits alone in her car, parked in the dim grocery-store parking lot just off Route 8, at the edge of one of Connecticut's many dreary, dusty, dying industrial towns along the Housatonic. It's a polluted, viscous-looking river, a miserable soup the color of army fatigues. I picture the parking lot, in the shadow of the interstate overpass, at the edge of the river, cracked asphalt, broken lights. Shoppers shuffle out of the store—depressed, unsmiling people, fat and tattered or bony and desperate-looking, hauling flimsy paper bags to rusted-out cars that might as well be dumped in a salvage lot. On Route 64, wider and straighter than Transylvania Avenue, the ride should be better, but it's not. My father floors it and skids on the curve where we once nearly hit someone head-on. At his best, my father is an aggressive, impatient driver who takes the truck out of gear to fly down steep hills. He blows the horn, curses, tailgates almost to the point of impact—and I have to look away. In daylight, if he's in a good mood, I hold my breath and hope that we won't fly off a cliff or smash into the fieldstone walls or oak trees that line those back-country New England roads. But on nights like this, when he's tense, I can't push away the creeping fear that he's playing some game of driver's roulette. When she waits for me at the halfway point, my mother won't dare get [End Page 119] out of the car for a soda or candy bar. I try not to let guilt add to my anxiety, but I can't stop thinking that the whole thing is my fault. Not just this particular spring Sunday in 1968, when everything went wrong—returning late from the neighbor's, homework misplaced, then mice in the grain, horses late showing up for feeding—so that we left a half hour too late. But the whole thing, this new arrangement, my parents splitting the long drive between his cabin in the country and her home near Long Island Sound. Used to be and always was, from their divorce when I was a toddler until just a few months before, that if my father wanted to see me, it was his job to drive over and get me. "Home" was wherever she lived, whether it was the temporary refuge of her mother's house right after their divorce, or the house my stepfather bought when they married. In my father's house, I am always a guest. In the log cabin on his farm, he moves onto a cot in the living room when I show up, turning over his room to me. In the swank, modernist bachelor pad he owned in my home town, I slept in a spare room with bare white walls, Venetian blinds, and masculine, dark brown furniture. Every Sunday he picked me up from "home," drove me to "his place," and then returned me to another six days at home. But when he moved to the country two years before, and the drive between houses increased from ten minutes to an hour, he decided that the commute merited more time at his place, and he expanded our visits to full weekends. Through the ten years of their divorce, the driving arrangement had evolved into an unspoken peace. A peace I broke with what I thought was a simple request: to work as the hat-check girl in my stepfather's nightclub, make some money on Saturday nights, and, although I didn't say so, also get to spend Saturdays once more with my friends, who were just starting to roam in same-sex gangs along the beaches, girls meeting up with boys to surreptitiously smoke cigarettes, flirt, and sometimes even kiss. I eye the...