Coalinga, Northbound

Every stranger has a story...

The thing about Gram, he was telling me, was that she always got her way. It wasn't that she was controlling or needy; it was more like she couldn't bear not being a part of everything. She'd always send the card for his birthday, usually red and frilly like a valentine. That was nice. And of course she'd call that morning to wish him a happy one, to ask about his plans for the day - that was nice, too. But the thing is, she'd also have already called him the day before, to make sure he'd gotten the card ("But don't you dare open it early, Paulie!"), and the day after, to ask whether those plans had gone as he hoped. He loved her dearly, he said, but, even from four hundred miles away, she could be a bit - he paused to choose his words carefully - suffocating.

He stopped to cough and clear his throat again and assured me he wasn't contagious. (Isn't what everyone says? - but I didn't wonder that out loud). But Paul did seem a likeable guy, easygoing and quick to make friends, even in the sterile confines of the clinic. His neat but open-necked Oxford and jeans marked him as one of those thirty-something professionals who had gravitated to San Francisco not for the crazy nightlife or relentless corporate climb, but for the more aesthetic pleasures that the city offered. And there was a boyish way he kept combing back the sandy blond part of an otherwise conservative haircut that he'd let - deliberately, I suspected - get just a little too long. Me? I was on my way to Bolivia next month and needed a few booster shots to get up to date. Him? Well, apparently we were getting to that. The long way around.

The thing was, even ignoring the risk of contagion, he was beginning to make me uncomfortable. I mean, we both had time to kill and there was no one else to talk with, but confessing your family's control issues to a total stranger didn't fall into one of the expected topics for waiting room conversation.

My unease seemed lost on Paul as he waxed nostalgic. When he was young, he said, his parents would pile him and his two sisters in the back of the family station wagon, a cavernous beige and brown Oldsmobile with fake wood trim, for the twice-yearly drive down the Central Valley to see Gram in Pasadena. The Olds had a third seat you could fold out to face backwards and look where you'd been - you know, he said, "like in the movie". But mostly they just kept it flat and threw a bunch of pillows there to give the kids a place to lie down and sleep during the hours of featureless I-5 monotony.

They had tricks to pass the time: prizes for spotting the first oil well, the first palm tree. The license plate game and working your way through the alphabet on road signs. Once in a while, down that barren four-hour stretch south of Stockton, his father would clear his throat and take a deep breath in preparation for breaking the silence. "Let's just see if there's anything on worth listening to," he'd say to no one in particular, and reach for the radio. He always started at the bottom of the FM band, turning the right-hand knob slowly, craning his neck as if listening for some faint signal from Amelia Earhart or the lost patrol. Occasionally the speaker would burst into life with the sounds of Crazy Eddie's car dealership, mariachi music or the monotonous drone of a farm report; his father would listen for a half minute, gauging the station's prospects for improvement, then move on.

He never bothered with the AM - "Nothing but God and Mexicans on the AM, and I don't understand either of them," he said.

Back then, Paul said, it never occurred to him to wonder why his mother never drove. She'd always sit there to his father's right, charting their progress on the layers of AAA maps that covered the dashboard and her lap like a paper snowdrift. "Sixteen miles to Coalinga, kids," she'd announce, then do the calculations in her head. "At this rate, we'll see it in fourteen and a half minutes." Then she'd set her watch and announce, fifteen minutes later, that we were well within the margin of error and that, unless there was traffic on the Grapevine, we ought to be at Gram's by dinner.

There was, of course, no special significance to Coalinga, but there were no other towns along the way that even had highway signs until you got to Kettleman City, and she too seemed to need some way to pass the time.

Kettleman City always loomed large in his memories of the trip, he said. Biggest McDonalds in the world there, or at least that's what some kid in school had told him. And it became a ritual early on that - if the kids were good - they could stop at Kettleman City and get Happy Meals ("But remember, if you fight over the toys, Mom is going to have to take them all away."). They never fought much anyway, and even if they did, his father always found some excuse to forgive them; Paul figured his father needed the break more than they did, and sat outside in the shade of the Hamburglar and Mayor McCheese-themed umbrellas taking long slow draws on one of the Marlboros he kept stashed in the glove box.

They'd always make it to Pasadena on time, or within his mother's "margin of error" and settle into the clockwork ritual of Dinner at Gram's. The house sat up at the base of the mountain, small, neat and white, like some miniaturized colonial outpost misplaced in the hills of Southern California. She met them at the door, invariably aproned with oven mitt in hand, as though to emphasize that she'd spent the day preparing for them and was just stepping away from the kitchen for the first time, to offer them welcome. And she'd line them up as soon as they were inside: "Now Theresa, you're sure you're not stealing Paulie's dinner under the table? You'll be twice as tall as him, the way you're growing. And Mary - oh, look how lovely you are!" Mary wasn't, not particularly, and it didn't bother her, but as much as Gram's observations tended toward the wishful, the children had been warned not to contradict her. "It gives her pleasure," their mother said, "So please - please, please just smile and say 'I'm glad you think so.'"

The Naugahyde waiting room chair creaked as Paul leaned back, cleared his throat again and looked up wistfully. "That was one of the most important sentences anyone ever taught me," he said. "I'm glad you think so."

Dinner itself was always spaghetti and meatballs. Always. Gram presided from the head of the table, ladling her blended-smooth tomato sauce over everything from a gold-edged china tureen, but when Paul asked for extra meatballs, he liked to keep them separate, on the side, to sprinkle salt on and eat dry, bite by bite at the end of his fork.

And then, once the plates were cleared, it was time for The Piano. He couldn't remember a time when he didn't think of it being spelled that way - an object, an ordeal singular and significant enough to warrant being capitalized out of awe and fear: The Bomb, The Plague. The Piano.

Naturally, all three kids had been expected to learn to play. Ostensibly by their father, who insisted that skill with a musical instrument was one of the hallmarks of a well-bred member of society. But his formulaic repetition of the pronouncement betrayed it as something that had been imposed upon him as a child, and they dared not risk the consequences of asking what it implied for their own mother, who played nothing.

So Theresa, Mary and Paul endured weekly lessons with Mrs. Weiner on Channing Ave., promising to practice for 30 minutes every evening except Sundays. Mary took to the challenge earnestly in the spirit of a middle child, tackling Chopin and Liszt with enthusiasm. Theresa, always the rebel, plonked and banged the keyboard in a manner that seemed to be calculated to madden Mrs. Weiner, and was eventually given permission to switch to guitar, which she taught herself with the help of cassette tapes from the local library.

It was Paul, the youngest, who always struggled, putting in - sure, not 30 minutes every day, but enough that he should have been making progress. And progress, in this family, meant having something new to play for Gram on each of those twice-yearly pilgrimages south.

At Gram's, Theresa would always have her out: she "forgot" to pack the guitar twice before her father insisted on seeing it in the car prior to leaving the house. And even then, she managed to forestall a lengthy recital by launching into her rendition of something by the Sex Pistols or Circle Jerks. Eventually, she was simply excused from the entire exercise.

By that point Mary had mastered not only the keyboard itself but all of the graces that surrounded Gram's idea of a recital. She would face her mostly reluctant audience with the sheet music held between pinched fingers and intone the title of the piece to be played in the manner of an English butler, then bow slightly and seat herself, poised above the keyboard for just a breath before launching into some dizzying Bach invention.

Her performance further accentuated the contrast with Paul's lack of skill, even on the so-called "beginner's pieces". On a good day he might make it a half dozen bars in before stumbling, retrying a phrase a few times, and restarting the whole thing from the beginning. By the third attempt, Gram was praising his perseverance and asking if anyone else would like more coffee.

"You know, Paulie," she'd say later in the evening, "Skill is good, but stick-to-it-iveness is better. As long as you're practicing. You are practicing, aren't you?"

And he was, and said so, and she believed him. It will come, she promised. It will come.

Paul sat back here, checked his watch and looked up at the clock above the table of neatly-arranged Family Circle and Sunset magazines. He made some offhand comment about doctors and why they're called "waiting rooms," coughed once into a handkerchief, then leaned in to continue.

It was about a month ago that he got the call from his mother. Gram been in decline for quite a while, but seemed to be hanging on without too much discomfort. The birthday phone calls had stopped long ago and the cards, when they still came, were now written in an unfamiliar hand - Paul assumed that of the hospice nurse - with only the brief scrawl of her once-elegant signature at the bottom. When they did speak (now it was Paul who called on her birthdays), she would ask how his piano lessons were progressing and he had learned to lie convincingly - he saw no point in denying her such a small pleasure.

But then it was his mother on the phone, saying how Gram had gone peacefully - Paul raised his hands slightly from the arms of his chair when he said "peacefully," as if to suggest that I extrapolate an implied set of air-quotes. And his mother said that, seeing as how Gram wished to be cremated, there would be no funeral per se. But she was flying down to help with the estate and expected that they'd have some sort of memorial service he'd need to come to Pasadena for.

The old house looked remarkably unchanged. College, then study abroad, then his marriage to Mark had pulled him farther afield over the years, providing increasingly plausible reasons for missing those family reunions. And by the time he and Mark returned to the Bay Area, the spell of the ritual had been broken - how long had it been since he'd seen her in person? But the cheerful-if-dated silver and red candy stripe wallpaper still hung in the dining room. The low coffee table by the fireplace was still arrayed with small cut crystal bowls of cashews and pistachios, so vivid in his memory that he wondered whether they'd just remained there, untouched since his childhood. Mary flew in early from Boston and Theresa drove down from Sedona, looking surprisingly subdued and respectful. And there was mom and Aunt Ginny and all the uncles whose names he could never remember, but who didn't seem to mind, and everyone was milling around more like it was a cocktail party than a memorial service.

There were speeches and toasts, the common theme of which seemed to be that Gram had had a good life, and had lived it exactly the way she wanted. The older folks seemed to chuckle a little whenever this last point was made. And when it was all over and he and Mary were cleaning up the last of the paper plates, his mother came to him with a look of sympathy.

"So, Paulie, I know you weren't all that close to her, but she always admired you. 'He's got that stick-to-it-iveness,' she'd always say, once you were out of earshot."

He thanked her, but she had more to tell him.

"The thing is, we were going through the will..." - now she had his complete attention, and he turned to face her.

"...She wants you to have the piano."

He was caught off guard by his own laugh, but his mother seemed to understand.

"Yes, I know. I know it doesn't fit into your life, and I'm pretty sure it doesn't fit into your apartment. But it clearly gave her pleasure to know that it was going to you. You and your stick-to-it-iveness."

Now, she laughed too, in the same voice. Of course she knew about his polite fictions and appreciated the irony of the gift as much as anyone. But then she was serious again.

"Would you at least keep it for a little while?"

He promised he would, and reserved a Ryder truck for the following weekend.

He and Mark would drive down on Saturday morning, load the piano up with help from the kids at Starving Students Movers, and drive back the next morning. The folks at DC Musical had introduced him to someone local who claimed they could get it through his front door and into the living room when they got home, and they figured that they'd take it from there when the time came. Maybe they'd keep the piano after all. Maybe he would try learning again, and maybe this time it would all click.

Honestly, he said, the piano itself wasn't anything special: a 1922 Gulbransen Baby Grand in walnut. Maybe if it were expertly restored, but Gram's looked like it had been refinished by a weekend hobbyist in hardware store varnish, with smears and drips frozen in time. Somewhere, Paul remembered from his childhood, there had even been the remains of a fly caught as if in amber. No, it wasn't an heirloom by any stretch of the imagination, but it was Gram's and he had to take it.

His mother called again on Friday night, asking one more favor..

"You can't imagine how awkward I feel asking you to do this," she said. It was just that Gram's urn - well, they wouldn't mail it, and seeing as how Paul was going to be in Pasadena anyway...

Sure, he said. He'd bring the urn back too.

The tire blew out two miles short of Coalinga, northbound in the passing lane. Paul was driving, using Gram's brass urn as an armrest while Mark leaned over from the right seat, trying to get his Sam Shepard audiobook to play on the stereo. The steering buckled, and the truck left the highway sideways, rolling lengthwise like a log for nearly a hundred yards before it came to rest on its side.

Highway Patrol said that, all things considered, they were very lucky. Airbags on those big trucks didn't often work they way they were supposed to, and the lack of a front impact meant that the energy of the crash was dissipated slowly as they rolled. Paul pulled the collar of his shirt of his shirt sideways, revealing a dark bruise running down from his shoulder where the shoulder belt had caught him, then thought better of it. "Sorry - I'm oversharing, aren't I?" No, no, it was okay.

Mark had fared a little worse: a concussion on the right from where his head hit the side window, and lacerations on the left from Gram's tumbling urn. Turns out those things can be dangerous, he said. But they were both fine, really.

And the piano? It had parted ways with the truck on the first roll. The family in the Chevy Impala a few lengths back said it went straight up, as if launched by a giant catapult when the truck disappeared in a tumbling cloud of desert dust. "It was turning over, like in slow motion, like it was flying away," the wife said, "I knew I should be looking after whoever was in that poor truck and praying for them, but I couldn't take my eyes off that piano."

When it did come to earth, the Gulbransen left a trail of debris they never did find the end of. Paul had driven back the following week, mostly out of curiosity, and spent half the afternoon tracing the trail of impacts. Every time he thought he'd found the end of it, there'd be a glint of light further on, a brass fitting or ivory key thrown just a little farther. He gathered a handful of them - he didn't know why - and left the rest for the insurance company to deal with.

He sat back now and shrugged his shoulders like there was nothing left to say, then erupted in another fit of coughing, which he tried to smother with the handkerchief that had never left his hand.

"Oh, right, right," he said, once he'd recovered his breath. "Gram."

"Gram?" The way he said it, it seemed he thought invoking her name explained something.

"Yeah, Gram."

It took a couple of minutes for Paul and Mark to come to their senses and kick open the driver's side door of the destroyed truck, and they climbed out with the assistance of the husband in the Impala. Mark was bleeding and disoriented and both were coughing heavily, but by the time the Highway Patrol arrived, it was clear that neither was seriously injured. Still, it took a while to make sense of the fine gray dust that covered them both from head to toe.

He looked me dead in the eye with a wry smile and waited.

"Gram?"

"Gram."

Yeah, he said, he lost the piano, but they still have the urn. And he likes to think she'd be happy to know that he'll always carry a bit of her - he coughed again, deliberately this time, and thumped his chest - right here inside of him.

Reviews

[A. Amos]

I really like the flow and your story telling is simply spectacular!

[David Pablo Cohn]

Awww - thanks! It was a fun story to tell.

[A. Amos]

Youre most welcome my friend...