A Strangely Long Roadtrip, from Carrie's Point of View

Saturday, February 5, 2005

It was Dad’s forty-seventh, although they would likely celebrate Sunday afternoon instead. Collette had thoughts of bringing balloons, but Mom would get the gelato instead, and then there would be gifts later.

The trip to Wheaton had been fun; even the ten hours in the car had passed relatively quickly. Collette read a bit of Shirley Temple Black, and how her first husband became “Mr. Clean”, and her second husband co-owned a pineapple company and spoke French, Malayan, and several Tahitian dialects.

On the way up, however, Carrie-Bri soon became bored, as she had no good book to read, and took to headaches if she read in the car anyway.

A trailer of black cows passed by at one point, their soft black noses stuck through the grates for the fresh cold morning air.

“Aw….” Carrie crooned. “They’re so cute!”

Eve thought about this a moment and said, “No… cows don’t really get me.”

“Eve!” Carrie laughed. “How could they not? They’re so cute. They just rub their little noses up against you. And their big eyes….”

“No,” Eve was still sure. “There are way more cuter animals out there.”

Shortly later, Carrie pulled out a lighter and burnt one strand of her dead hair. (It had been colored, stripped, cut, and pulled, at least ten times the previous year, and it could hardly be more brittle than at that point.) The smell of burnt hair soon filled the car.

“Whoo-wee!” Carrie groaned and stuck the lighter back in her purse.

“Oh, Carrie!” Eve waved the smell away with her hand.

Carrie sprayed a bit of scent – “happy” – from a tiny glass bottle.

“Spread it around; share it with everybody,” Carrie waved her hands up and down like paddles.

Collette turned around to the growing smell, saying, “Now it smells like “happy”, Hardees, and burnt hair in here, guys.”

They all moaned.

A short bit of time passed again, and as they sped by Kankakee, Illinois, Carrie groaned:

“Guys, I have nothing to do. I may as well kill myself.” She looked around in her bag and found something of interest. “Oooh… markers. I’m going to draw where we are.”

She pulled one straight line across the page to indicate their position. Then she folded it into a paper airplane and threw it up to the dashboard. OLeif picked it up to throw it back.

Carrie-Bri thought aloud, “If I throw a paper airplane out the window, is that littering…. Whoa! Is that a volcano?”

They all looked out the left where a massive mound of colored dirt lay across a field. It certainly had the appearance of a volcano, with orange dirt and lava-like colors on the side, rivulets, where lava might have once flowed…

But soon Carrie was back to her mischief.

“Eve, do you want a tattoo?” She flourished her markers once again.

“Uh… no thanks,” Eve laughed, as the radio which was scanning across the stations, landed on someone saying, “You can get a heart-shaped pizza”.

“Oh!” Carrie exclaimed. “It was so funny. At the orthodontist the other day, one of the nurses says to Joe, ‘So Valentine’s Day is coming up. Do you want hot pink or baby pink bands?’ And she was joking, but Joe’s like, ‘I think I’ll take red.’ And the nurse asks him if he has a girlfriend, and he says, ‘No, not yet.’ But he was so serious about the whole thing. It was really funny.”

Collette laughed, recalling how Joe had been so happy with his red bands the other day, proudly showing her his new color.

Then it was on to Carrie explaining to Eve how she was buying gas masks and bio-hazard suits for everyone’s birthdays that year. Eve opted for a normal gift, when asked for her preference.

And then, as they pulled into Wheaton, Carrie whipped out the sheet for madrigal dinner.

“Guess what, Eve, I’m in charge of assigning dance partners for the dances, and you can help me!”

“Oh!” Eve sounded excited. “That’s so bad!”

She grabbed the sheet and looked over it. And so they discussed it until the college was in sight.

The campus was beautiful, and Diana was so excited as soon as she saw them. Everyone got a big hug, and it was off to chapel for African singing, dancing, and Asian break-dancing. It was pretty funny, a very abnormal worship service, Diana explained.

Then she played tour guide for the next hour and during lunch at Saga where they met her new friends. The food was good – everything imaginable. And it was good to see Diana in a place she loved. Although she was terribly excited to return home.

On the way back, while everyone talked, they passed patches of life, strewn across the fields – smoky fields where groves of trees and ancient farmhouses clustered like oasis. Patterns of birds in the sky flew in shapes of sheiks, riding hard across the dessert. And the conversation turned to why Santa was a communist in their most recent play, guessing how many calories and grams of sodium were in Carrie’s peach ice tea, and talk of dunking sandwiches, salads, and caramel brownies back at home for dinner with both their families and the Moss’.

And then they actually returned to see the Moss’! After sixteen years – It was absolutely marvelous to see them all again. It had been so terribly long. And Diana began to remember more and more, the longer they spoke of old memories. Apple had brought an old book the Snicketts and Gentles had pieced together for Apple and Elazar before they left back for Australia.

Their accents where enchanting, and they were all quite funny. Apple would be married the third of December, and she was perfectly lovely about everything.

Elazar, who appeared to be twenty-six or twenty-seven, instead of almost nineteen, worked at a liquor store back in Sydney, as the legal age was eighteen. He wore uggs (though not real ones – K-Mart brand, he replied, laughing, when Carrie asked if they were real).

And they spoke of the aboriginal gangs and Asian gangs, the “Westies” (equivalent to hoosiers – which they thought was hilarious, the word “hoosier”), and of the surfing and beaches.

They had just come from Hawaii and were next on to Denver for a week of skiing and then to L.A.

They were the most pleasant brother and sister, and it was quite obvious that they got along splendidly. It was a good evening together.