You Are Here(4)
“What’s the point?” Dad would say whenever Peter slid a travel magazine across the dinner table, or showed him some advertisement for a sale on airline tickets or a kids-stay-free deal at a roadside motel. “You want to pay for a crappy room with a broken mattress and a moldy showerhead, when you can stay in the comfort of your own home for free?”
He’d sweep an arm across the kitchen to demonstrate those very comforts, highlighting the rusty faucet and partially unhinged cabinets with all the enthusiasm of a game-show host. The whole house—which they’d moved into just after Peter was born and his mother died, events separated only by minutes, a double feature of joy and tragedy that had forever confused that day—was decorated in various shades of green, which had faded over the years to give the place an algae-like feeling, gauzy and faded, like they were living in a long-forgotten shipwreck under the sea.
Peter was hard-pressed to pick out the so-called comforts of the place, and thought a change of scenery—a seaside cottage in Cape Cod, or a tourist trap near the Grand Canyon—might do them both a great deal of good. But Dad seemed just as content to flop down on the couch each night after work, still decked out in his police uniform, so that he looked like an extra in one of those TV shows, an officer thrown aside as the criminal makes his break. For him the comforts of home included a can of beer, a bowl of peanuts, and a baseball game with the volume turned low enough that he might dip in and out of sleep.
And so, until today, the only place checked off Peter’s list—which took up half a spiral notebook, including addendums and footnotes—was New York City, which he’d once visited with his class on the biannual school field trip. He’d been just nine, and had fallen asleep on the bus ride down—something that later seemed horribly unfair, like he’d been swindled by his heavy eyelids—and had missed the scenery, though he could have quite easily directed the bus driver from Route 12 to I-87 and straight on into the city without thinking twice.
But it was the outside world he’d most wanted to see, the river gorges and hillsides that marked a transition from one place to another. When he woke up, enormous buildings had sprouted on either side of the bus as if by magic, and he’d spent the day trailing after the rest of his class in an unblinking daze. On the way home he’d somehow fallen asleep again, lulled by the rocking motion of the bus, and Hank Green had put a straw up his nose, and Liza and Maggie Kessler—evil twins if there ever were—had drawn a handlebar mustache on his face with red marker that took three days to rub out completely.
His class had gone back three times since then, but that was Peter’s only trip. The second time he’d had chicken pox, and he’d come down with a bad case of strep throat on the third. Last year he’d been excluded as a punishment for “smart-mouthing” his teacher, though he’d only been trying to correct her after she repeatedly mispronounced “fallback plan,” describing the Union’s second-day battle strategy at Gettysburg as a “fall- black plan.” Afterward, when she’d sent him to the principal’s office, Peter had refused to admit to the “heckling” he was accused of and therefore sat in mute silence until his dad arrived, his badge prominently displayed, looking vaguely pleased at the idea of his son’s first foray into troublemaking. Peter had always suspected his father would have known better how to raise a kid who threw eggs at people’s windshields or set off stink bombs in the school bathroom. As it was, the man had no clue how to deal with a too-skinny, bespectacled boy who somehow preferred maps and battlefields to baseball and video games.
They’d fashioned a sort of invisible line inside the house, which seemed to work for them most of the time. Dad rarely appeared at Peter’s door or questioned where he’d been when he spent his summer afternoons wandering around town. And in return Peter was careful to tiptoe around the crumpled figure of his father in the evenings, occasionally throwing away an empty beer can or refilling the bowl of peanuts if he was feeling generous.
So just the other day when there was a knock on Peter’s door, he looked up from his maps in surprise. He’d been planning not a trek through the Himalayas or a walkabout in the Australian outback but just a short jaunt north to Canada, to Montreal or Quebec, where he might cross the border as confidently and casually as if he were a purveyor of maple syrup, or perhaps a hockey aficionado, who had been doing it his whole life.
“I thought you were gonna take out the garbage,” Dad said, staring at the array of flattened maps that tiled the floor. “What, did you get lost or something?”
He laughed as if the joke had only just occurred to him, though he tended to use it at least once or twice a week, and it had long stopped being even remotely funny to Peter, who simply chose to ignore him. After a moment Dad’s mouth snapped back into a straight line, and he put on his aviator glasses, despite the dimness of the room. “So, planning your big escape?”
Peter sat back on his heels. “I’m not trying to escape,” he said, knowing this wasn’t entirely true. “Though it might be nice to go somewhere.”
“You know, not everyone can afford to just pick up and go somewhere whenever they want,” Dad said, with a somewhat contemptuous look at the maps spread out like blueprints at his feet. “Not everyone has the means to just go traipsing around the globe.”
Peter braced himself for yet another lecture about the many vices of those with money, the students who clogged the town each fall, the professors who taught them, the very notion of stipends and trust funds and endowments. Dad believed in a hard day’s work and building character and home cooking (in theory, at least). He believed in responsibility and cleaning up your own mess and having a strong work ethic. He believed in being homegrown and salt of the earth. He hated high horses.