The Way To The Lighthouse

THE WAY TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

Directions: -from Syracuse, Route 81 North 71 miles
-Exit 46 at Watertown
-Left to 12E 25 miles north to Cape Vincent, dead end at my grandmother’s house on the river
-Left 3 miles to Tibbets Point Lighthouse.

MILE 99 ONRAMP
My problem lies southwest of here, so if I put enough miles in the middle, then maybe my heart can also go the distance.
My fingers curve into the steering wheel as my little car accelerates like a white bullet up the onramp to the highway. These roads and streets, entrances and exits, I have known my whole life. The map in my brain is intact, even though I have been away for many years. Driving requires nothing more of me than my physical presence in the car. Every part of me except my tortured heart is on cruise control.
I glance into my rearview mirror to check on the children. My little girl is strapped into her car seat, looking at pictures in books. She can’t read yet, but is content enough to leaf through Curious George. The setting sun slants into the car window from the left, alighting her hair. It is blonde now, but it is the shade of blonde that is destined to turn as dark as my
own. I can’t actually see my baby because she is facing backwards, just as the law dictates.

But she seems happy enough with only the back seat to look at, and I can hear her sucking on

her pacifier. I can even tell by the way she is sucking it that she is almost asleep. They are both in pajamas, so that when I take them out of the car I can lay them straight into bed. The only problem is that I don’t know where we’ll be sleeping tonight. I’ll deal with that later. I can’t face it now. The trick is to keep driving and feel as little as possible. I finally have chosen a destination, and for now that’s enough. I am going to the lighthouse, because where else could I go? The thought of the lighthouse is dimly comforting. Dimly because it is still so far away, just a pinprick of light on the horizon. I can only hope that it will get brighter as I close the gap, and this gap that I must cross is an gigantic one. First, I have to keep myself together mentally so I can drive the physical distance. Then I must somehow bridge the gaping hole of time, back to my childhood, when I was able to find peace from the lighthouse. After all, it has been more than twenty years.
It’s a simple idea, really. A lighthouse exists to guide the ships, to let them know where the rocks lie beneath the surface, so that they may pass safely through shallow waters. If I go there, perhaps I will also find safe passage. I remember being young and the river was dark and watching the twirling light spill out across the water, again and again, as if it would go on like that forever. It’s funny how things made impressions on me as a child that never even register to me now as an adult: how huge the leaves of rhubarb are; how the gold and silver colored crayons always look better as crayons than on paper, where they make a suspiciously dull colored smear; how important it is not to turn the T.V. off until you see
every last credit on the last television program you’re allowed to watch before you have to go to bed; how fun it is to just run; how great board games are; and, above all, how beautiful a lighthouse is. I hope to be able to see it like that again, that the eyes staring out of these sockets that are starting to wrinkle at the edges can catch and hold the sparkle of light dancing on water.
I just hope I can make it there. I think I might die if I don’t.

MILE 74 BRIDGE ICY IN WINTER
I am now crossing a bridge. The sun has set but the clouds are still glowing pink with golden trim, like cotton candy lit from within. They are reflected beckoningly on the river below. For one fleeting moment I consider veering sharply to the right and trying my luck at flying. The pain is that bad. My heart doesn’t just feel broken; it feels shattered, and I am being cut deeply by the jagged pieces within. Every time I move, I feel a puncture somewhere and something leaking. I look again in the rearview mirror and I see that my eldest daughter has joined her sister in dreamland. I feel more in control now, looking at them. But that just seems to make the pain worse, knowing that there will be no quick release. Can I continue existing just for them, when all I have left of myself is a hollow shell going through the motions of being alive?

MILE 66 NO PASSING
I snap the radio off in disgust. Every song since I left my mother’s house has been about love: lost love, unrequited love, rediscovered love, good love, bad love. Isn’t there
anything else to sing about? What about world hunger? Poverty? The space shuttle? Anything at all? Or what about real life? Like your husband leaving you for a younger woman, moving to Brazil with her so that you will never get a dime of child support? Then you find yourself penniless at thirty-five years of age and have to move back in with your mother. How about that? Or how about when you finally find the courage to date again, and meet who you think is your soulmate and fall in love and then he tells you --and then he tells you--
I can’t think about it. It hurts too much and is still too fresh. Just keep driving.
I drive in silence, which is even worse than the radio. Only the sad music of my thoughts keeps me company. It plays the same song over and over again, a skip in the record of my life. I can’t help it, I keep seeing Richard leaning across the orange Formica table of the diner at what was to be our last date, just close enough so that I could smell his cologne, and saying: “We have to talk.” We have to talk. What else could it have meant? What else does it ever mean? He loves me but he’s going to break my heart. He loves me but he could never be a father figure to someone else’s children. Parenthood is something he’s not ready for. Oh, he still loves me of course and if only I were childless.......
What’s the point? Even though I’m divorced I’m not free. There wasn’t even any choice for me. I didn’t even consider leaving my children for Richard. Not once. I didn’t even think that its because I love them so much. It’s just a given. Nor did he ask me to abandon them. There was no decision. As soon as I told him that I was a mother, he didn’t want me anymore. Because he didn’t want children, we couldn’t be together.
Where is Richard now? What is he doing? Feeling? Could he be sorry that he let me go? I see his existence as a dot on a map, because I know where he lives. I have been in his house, in his bed. His point is glowing red, waxing and waning with his heartbeat. With every mile I get farther and farther away from that point, but I cannot escape from it completely. I still judge my position in relation to that point. And in the silence of my car, the laws of physics warp and bend so that I am both moving away from him and moving toward him, but never able to pull even with him. Never able to get past him. He will always be on my distant horizon, whether he is far ahead or way behind.
I turn the radio back on. I can’t keep thinking about it. There’s nothing I can do, except drive and drive and drive.

MILE 51 TRUCKS USE LOW GEAR
Going down a hill now. I have to concentrate on my speed, not on my pathetic excuse for a life. It’s important to ease off on the gas, and perhaps even brake, when one is going down a slope. Otherwise gravity pulls you even faster to the bottom. And if one of New York’s finest happens to be curled up like a snake in that turnaround ahead, well -- who cares about getting pulled over, anyway? If I got a ticket, I would laugh in the cop’s face and say, “Is that the worst you can do? That’s nothing.” Because for a minute there I was back in bed with Richard.
I remember running my fingers along the muscles on his back and thinking of rocks caressed smooth by the current. He smelled of the river, especially after we made love; a deep, watery smell that comes after millions of years of being sucked up into clouds, condensing, falling back upon the raw earth and working its way back to the river, returning to the ocean to be sucked up again into the air. An ancient smell. I would lie in his arms, just inhaling, and feeling as though I was breathing in his very soul.
There are no words for a love like that. It was a love as perfect as a dewdrop on a rose, and as fragile. Not all good love is strong. In my memories, he will always be perfect. I did not know him long enough to know all his faults. Only one thing was clear, that he did not want to be a father.
I have to pull over because I am sobbing so hard.
His phantom scent surrounds me in the car and I taste salt tears in my mouth. I am mostly water, but still not complete.

MILE 42 RESTROOMS
I have to go to the bathroom. At least its something else to think about.

MILE 28 FOOD, GAS, LODGING
I exit the highway and pull into a gas station. I go as quickly as possible because of my sleeping children in the car. I try and avoid the mirror in the bathroom, but I see myself anyway. My flaws fill up the whole of my reflection and then overflow the mirror, spilling onto the filthy floor for the world to see and trample on. There’s a grey hair at my right temple, probably due to my eldest daughter’s first attempt to ride a bicycle. There are deep crow’s feet around my eyes. Who is this sad, middle-aged woman? What she calls her life is a joke. I rush out before I can see anymore.
At the pumps there is a young couple in their teens. He is filling the tank of a VW Rabbit convertible and she is checking her hair in the mirror, her manicured fingers picking delicately through her bangs. Her eyes in the mirror meet mine and lock. In an instant I know her, how young she is, how this summer evening fills her soul with excitement. How in love she is. And I think about John. Was I ever in love with him? I must have been but I have forgotten. We had been together so long that we were just fingernails on each other’s chalkboards.
Perhaps the only reason that Richard seemed different was because he was new. He had a kind of intensity about him, an aura that surrounded him and touched all that was near him. He also had a flair for the melodramatic but it was like a set of clothes that suited him well and without which he would have been naked. It’s Richard that I see in this girl’s eyes: the magic of love before reality can spoil it. She is probably in love with her boyfriend. Unless either meets someone more compatible, they will move in together, perhaps marry and have children. Her face will never look this way again, her eyes will never shine so bright. Her love is a deer in winter, bounding freely through frozen fields. But, like a deer, it can be run down on the highway. Run down by the vehicle of her own destiny. She will run herself down on a crisp winter night and not even feel the pain until long after the death.
My hand drops to the hood of my car and the tick,tick,tick of the cooling engine fills my brain. Tick, tick, tick. My time is still running. I yank my eyes away and manage to open the car door and collapse inside. It’s not too late for me. I have farther to go. I turn the key and drive down the road. The highway grows thinner and thinner until it becomes one-dimensional, then it is gone.
MILE 3 DETOUR
I pull into my grandmother’s driveway. There are no lights on, of course, but I’m disappointed anyway. She’s been dead for six months but I keep forgetting that. I get out of the car and touch the ‘For Sale’ sign. If only I were rich like she was. Riverfront property does not come cheap.
Perhaps if I were still married to John, we could sit down over dinner and discuss the possibility of buying this house. I see this scene in my mind as if it had actually happened. It is summertime, six-thirteen in the evening, and we are sitting down to dinner. My eldest girl isn’t hungry so she is just pushing food around on her plate, hiding the squares of pork chop under her potatoes. I would be spooning the mashed potatoes into the baby’s mouth, and my own dinner would sit untouched before me. John’s eyes would be scanning the newspaper which he always brought to the dinner table and lay to the left of his plate. I never could understand how he could eat without ever once looking at his food. I see the argument already taking shape in my head. “It would be great for the children,” I would say. “I had such fun there as a child. The river was like the biggest, wettest playground in the world. My cousins and I used to paddle up to different docks on our air mattresses, playing water taxi. We would catch fish, and then build tanks for them on the river’s edge out of rocks. The fish always escaped, of course, but that didn’t stop us from trying again. Our girls could have liquid childhoods like that. And I could teach at the elementary school in town and you could start your own insurance business. Maybe boating insurance.”
John’s eyes wouldn’t even leave the newspaper. “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard,” he would say. Whether the rejection stemmed from the idea itself being totally illogical or because I was the one who had suggested it, I wouldn’t know. Didn’t matter. I wouldn’t fight him. Part of the reason that I had married John was because of his rationality. His feet were rooted in the ground and I had always counted on him to provide for us. In a way, I admired him for running off to Brazil with his slut. It was the first crazy, impulsive thing he had done since I had known him. Must have been her idea.
All that is old business, like the house that stands before me. I spent the happiest times of my childhood here in this place. I close my eyes and I see ghosts. These ghosts are far dimmer than the spirit of John humiliating me at the dinner table. I see myself and my cousins, before puberty and all the horrors that happened afterwards: swimming and splashing and joyful. So full of joy that we felt always on the verge of bursting from it. I see the colorful air mattresses on the water, and the empty rock tanks. I see us at the dinner table, telling childish jokes (“Do you have Prince Albert in a can? Yes? Well, let him out!”) and then laughing our heads off because we were children. Those children no longer exist. They grew up and became adults; complicated, sour, splintered. And this house could be any house. It doesn’t glow magically in the soft light of evening. It is only special in the hearts of those who grew up here, and those hearts are older now. The air mattresses are gone, the rocks that formed our faulty fish tanks lie once again flat along the bottom. And the river has no memory.
I can’t go back. I can never be a child again because I have crossed some invisible line. The line that was reflected in Richard’s disappointed eyes. I feel cheated because no one ever told me that the line was there. I look at the darkened car. From this angle there appears to be no one inside. Why am I even here in this shadowy driveway looking at a house full of spirits who won’t be still?
Then I realize: my journey is not finished. This is not my destination. I have even farther to go.

MILE 0 NO OUTLET
The car rattles a bit over the loose stones as I pull into the lighthouse parking lot. I am the only one. It is too late for the tourists and too early for the desperate lovers. The dome light momentarily illuminates the sleeping faces of my daughters as I open the door and I indulge myself in a long look. My babies, my angels. Parts of me who aren’t me at all. Then I close the door and walk away.
The shore’s edge is different now, more rocky than I remembered, but the light is still there. It shines out from the beacon above my head, stretches itself across the water as far as the darkness will permit, and then draws itself back in for the next effort. I am determined to stand here and witness its beauty. I feel my legs strengthen under me and I repeat: I am determined to stand.
I think of John, droplets of sweat forming on his balding head; his skin, that never tans, burning and peeling and burning again in the harsh Brazilian sun. I think of Richard, swirling the ice around in his drink, sitting on his bar stool. Every month he takes up just that much more space as he slowly spreads across the middle, Levis getting tighter and tighter until it becomes obscene. I feel sorry for them. Their flat view of love. Their selfish pursuits. Then I think of the river, the deltas of my decisions, the tributaries of my troubles. I am so large, that I will not even know all of my own branches.
Then I cease to think at all. I walk to the outermost rock beyond the lighthouse and hold out my arms and I am no longer a wife. I am no longer a lover. I am no longer a mother. I just am. I get the strangest feeling that someone is standing directly behind me, looking over my shoulder, seeing what I see, feeling what I feel. I glance backward but there is no one. Then again, I knew there wouldn’t be. I face the river, the awesome ballet of the light on the water, and I listen for the sound of my life starting over again.