Hitching to Nirvana: a novel
by Janet Mason
Hitching to Nirvana is a recently completed mid-life and adolescence coming of age novel by Janet Mason. Excerpts have been published in the Schuylkill Valley Journal of the Arts and in Drive: women's true stories from the open road Seal Press) and in The Kirkus Review. The following section of Hitching (chapter 7) was published in an earlier version in the online edition of Exquisite Corpse. For future excerpts, return to amusejanetmason.com

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Adrianne, 2000
(The Sirens)

Adrianne cranked up the radio and drove up the street to her father's house. She punched the buttons from song to song, the 60s, the 70s, the 80s. She was forty five years old. Where had the years gone?

The emptiness inside of her was larger than she was-- too large to be filled by The One, the illusion she was running to, or the Familiar Stranger, which is how she suddenly thought of her partner of twenty years. Maybe she should have a baby. A memory of her old high school friend Thea rose in her mind--a wave illuminated by moonlight, cresting, then gone. Thea had had a baby in high school--and then she was gone.

Adrianne turned into her father's driveway, pulled to a stop and unbuckled her seat belt. She swung her legs out of the car and sat there. The rain had stopped and the sun was coming out. The air smelled like it had just been washed. She stood up, walked to the front door and knocked even though she had his key. The seashells that her mother had placed on the brick ledge, years ago, under the long rectangular windows on the front of the house were still there. Adriane leaned over, picked up a small whelk shell and studied it. It was perfect, from its narrow tail to the gentle curves on the side that swirled in on itself until it reached the center, an opening to a hollow place that had once been the home of a sea snail, a dry dark spot that could be wet sand that dried thirty years ago. The top of the faded brown pink beige shell was a spiral were nine raised bumps each marked a section that ran back down to the tail.

If it were ten times larger it would be a glistening Conch that she would hold to her ear and hear oceans, winds swirling up waves, the whole world washing up to her. Adrianne held the small whelk shell up to her ear--it was just about the size of an ear, a narrow one-it wasn't as loud as the Conch shells she had listened to as a child, but she pressed it tight and she began to hear whispers. She heard foamy waves erasing the traces of the pipers' delicate footprints. She heard the smaller breakers rolling in. She heard the gulls and the crash of the larger waves. She heard shrieks, the Maenads-starfish eyes and seaweed hair. Her old friends from high school --the girls she had tried to leave behind-were calling to her, screaming her name. They were not going to let her go. Adrianne put the shell back on the ledge. Carefully.

Her father opened the front door.

He probably remembered some of the Maenads, coming to this front door when Adrianne was an adolescent, claiming her then just as their ghosts claimed her now. She reached out for something solid, her father. She hugged him, putting her arms around his shoulders, her hands on his bony and sloping back. When she hugged him she still expected the firm body of the man who could fix anything, her bicycle, a leak in the sink of her house when she and the Familiar Stranger had first bought it. Who was this old man whose bony shoulders now jabbed into hers? Feeling how frail her father was, she trembled. He was eighty-five. He was frail. He could hardly see.

How had this happened?

Adrianne stepped through the doorway of her father's house, from sun into shadow. She was terrified of losing him. She didn't want him to stumble-as he did now, bumping into the armrest of his chair with his knee, mumbling, "Damnit."

Adrianne reached forward to take his arm. "I'm okay," shaking free of her, "I didn't see the chair."

Adrianne was afraid of what would happen if he fell when he was alone, in the house or out on his walk. She was so afraid that she wanted to run away. She would go to Rome, the ever-flowing fountains, The One. She reached up and touched the Labrys hanging on the silver chain around her neck. Maybe she should back to the home of the double-sided ax, to Crete, to its mountainous wave pounding coasts.

Adrianne walked over to her father's stereo, next to the TV in the front of living room, picked up Claude Debussy's La Mer and popped it in the cassette player. Adrianne had given this tape to her father for his last birthday. He liked classical music, but he was vague when she asked him if had listened to it. It was possible that he could not see well enough to put the tape into the cassette player. This recording was by Seraphim with the London Symphony Orchestra. The Sire~nes selection of Trois Nocturnes filled the room. A chorus of women's voices rose from the sea-mist, calling, beckoning, demanding surrender. Fingers on harp strings told the story as Adrianne remembered it: the kiss. She let the voices draw her back, back. More than memory, it was a dream that swept her to another place. The kiss. It was the only thing that mattered.
Could illusion be strong enough to become reality?
If a Siren called, would Adrianne follow?
Would she dash her life against the rocks?
Would she have a choice?

"The doctor wants me to have surgery."
Adrianne's father was losing his sight. He was blind in one eye (since childhood) and the vision in his other eye was narrowing from glaucoma. He was sitting in his brown recliner. Behind him, through the long rectangular front window, sun streamed in. Adrianne was sitting in the gold velour rocker, that she still thought of as her mother's chair, facing him. Adrianne sat there and blinked after her father spoke. It was her turn to squint when she tried to look at him (the light from the window bright in her eyes). Her father said he needed surgery but, when Adrianne opened her mouth and tried to reply, no words came out. Her father needed surgery. He was old and frail. Someday he would die. How was Adrianne going to live without him?

"The surgery is called 'a trab'," he said. "That's short for trabelectomy. He'll make a drain in my eye that will allow the fluid to drain so that my pressure will decrease. The doctor recommended that I have it, but he also said there are 'no guarantees.'"
Adrianne didn't know what that meant-whether there was no guarantee of his sight improving or if there was no guarantee that he would wake up from the surgery.
"What's the alternative?"
Adrianne, as she spoke, noticed that her father wasn't really looking at her. Rather, he was looking in her general direction-where he heard her voice coming from. She wondered how much he could see and how much he wasn't telling her.
"It's getting hard to see the TV."
"Oh."
Adrianne didn't want to tell him what to do. She had tried with her mother and it had been a mistake.
"I've decided," her father said, "that it's worth the risk."
Adrianne nodded.

They went to Friendly's for breakfast. The waitress's face was lined and leathery. She might have spent too much time in the sun over the years or perhaps she was a smoker. She was gruff and her fingers, as she held the ordering pad, were puffy and red-probably from snapping the dishtowel at the kitchen staff. This was the first time that Adrianne had seen her. She decided that she liked her. The waitress looked at Adrianne's father and asked, "What are you having to drink?"
"Senior hot cakes. No butter."
The waitress put her hand on her hip and looked at him with an ornery glint in her eye. "Hotcakes?! You're going to drink that? I told you I wanted to know what you're going to drink."
"Decaf."
"And you?" Coming from the waitress, the words were an accusation.
"I'll have the French toast and a cup of tea."
Then as the waitress was putting the ordering pad in her apron, Adrianne said, "Can I have lemon with that?"
"No." The waitress's lips were set in a straight line.
Adrianne laughed.
The waitress walked away, her set lips breaking into a smile.
"She reminds me of mom," said Adrianne.
Her father was laughing too. But when Adrianne mentioned her mother, he suddenly looked sad. "Not really," he answered.

When Adrianne was a pre teen and a teenager, her mother was going through menopause. Her father worked shift work and most nights was late coming to the dinner table. Like clockwork, her mother would go to the bottom of the stairs and yell, "What do you want? A fucking invitation?"
Adrianne felt a flush starting at the base of her neck, creeping upwards. She was sweating. She understood her mother better everyday. She wondered if someone turned up the heat, or if she was sick. Maybe it wasn't a hot flash. Maybe it was the flu or pneumonia. She was hot and she wanted to escape the heat. But she had already taken her jacket off and she wasn't wearing any more clothing that she could remove in public. She remembered how her mother sometimes used to sit around the house in just her bra and underpants. Adrianne had been mortified.

Adrianne sat very still until the flash--and the confusion--passed.
The waitress brought their breakfast, made a few acerbic remarks and left.
Adrianne squeezed a wedge of lemon into her tea. She looked at her father and thought that it was ironic that she was sitting here with him and that her mother had died first. Her mother was always terrified that Adrianne's father would die. Accident. Illness. Death. Or simply that he would vanish into thin air, like her father did when he was seven. "I don't think mom ever got over her father leaving."
"Hmmph."
Her father was looking at the scoop of butter on his pancakes. He hated butter. Adrianne took her spoon, reached over and scraped the butter into her saucer, which she put on the side of the table-the far side, away from the waitress. The bus boy would take care of it later.
"Remember how she always talked about Biloxi?" Adrianne's grandfather, her mother's father, was from Mississippi. The son of a Baptist minister, he rebelled by playing cards, drinking moonshine, and later abusing his wife and daughters before abandoning them.
"We went there several times," said her father. "No matter how many times we went she always wanted to go back."
Adrianne nodded and the two of them ate breakfast.
"How's Uncle Fred?" Adrianne took a sip from her teacup.
Thanks to the free minutes on her cell phone, Adrianne had managed to reunite her father with his brother who lived in Birmingham, Alabama.
"He has to have his foot amputated."
Adrianne nodded. She remembered her uncle telling her that he had diabetes when she spoke to him on the phone before handing it to her father. Her father rarely bothered with his side of the family. But when Adrianne found his name and number in her father's address book, she convinced him to call by saying that her free weekend cell minutes were going to waste. His younger brother was still at the same number and he still lived in the same trailer park that he had moved to when he left his first wife, the mother of Adrianne's two cousins.
"After the surgery, he's going to stay with his son."

He picked up the small glass pitcher of syrup and began to pour. Instead of holding it over the middle of the plate, e held it near the edge--which would be the logical place to pour something if you were blind in one eye and had glaucoma in the other. Adrianne reached over and took the pitcher from her father.
"Here dad, you don't want it to spill onto the table."
"How's Bette?" she asked.
"Who?"
"Bette, my cousin. She thought about saying 'your niece' but didn't. He hadn't seen her cousin in twenty-five years. Their families weren't close. When Adrianne had talked to her uncle she had asked about her cousin Bette and he had kept talking about his son's SUV, saying "he takes it out in the dirt and everything." Somewhere in men's
minds-and Adrianne didn't think this only happened in the deep South-where sons and SUVs were concerned, daughters didn't matter.
Adrianne took a bite of her French toast, swallowed, and took a sip of her tea. "I guess Bill will take him to the hospital in his new SUV." She heard the sarcasm in her voice and that fast she regretted it.
"Do you have Bill's phone number?"
"No."

Adrianne sighed over the forkful of French toast that was about to go into her mouth. This was typical of her family. The only person in his family that her father had ever stayed in touch with was his younger sister, who lived in Northern California. She had always called him occasionally, every other year for his birthday, once in a while to ask a question about the family history scrapbook she was compiling. Adrianne's father called too, after he hadn't heard from her for a while. It turned out that she was in bad health and had some dementia. Now he was the one who stayed in touch with her.
Adrianne's mother had stayed in touch with her only sister-- Adrianne's other aunt, but they had seen each other only a few times a year. They stayed in touch by sending each other birthday cards with nasty comments about getting old.

Adrianne pushed around the last pieces of French toast on her plate. There was so much she couldn't say to her father. She couldn't tell him that she felt like she no longer knew who the Familiar Stranger was and that she wanted to leave. She couldn't tell him about The One. She was sure her mother had fallen in love and married him because he was the kind of man who would never leave or even think of it.

Adrianne hadn't checked her e-mail since she had written to The One, with her late night promises of leaving everything, everyone. She was beginning to resent The One. She had been in a couple with one person or another since she was eighteen. She wanted to escape but she was realizing that running to another person was not the answer. She didn't want to leave one trap just to enter another. After she sent the e-mail, it occurred to her that she might be better off staying with the Familiar Stranger. But their relationship was falling apart. She told herself that she didn't care, but she knew that this was a lie. She always thought of herself as flying solo, as rising on the cusp of a wave that was her life. But the floor had started to slide out from under her the night that she realized the Familiar Stranger might leave her for someone else.

Her father picked up the tall plastic pitcher of decaf that the waitress had left on the table and began pouring it down the outside of his cup. Decaf spilled onto the table. Adrianne grabbed the pitcher, sat it upright on the table, and then pulled a handful of napkins from the dispenser and hastily cleaned up the mess that fortunately had stayed on the table. Adrianne picked up the pitcher and poured the rest into her father's cup.

Across the aisle a man her age was sitting with his elderly mother. He scowled over eggs and sausage. The mother looked in his direction, vacantly as if she was staring at a stranger, wondering what could possibly have happened to the son that she raised. The two of them ate in complete silence. Then they stood to leave and the mother, frail and stooped over, stopped to talk to friends at a nearby table. "You remember my son," she said, but he was gone, having vanished through the double glass doors.

Adrianne was drinking her second cup of tea as she took this all in. She turned to her father and asked about his week. She told him about a new work assignment that she had taken on-photographing industrial strength vacuum cleaners. Everything she said was met with one syllable, two at the most. Adrianne considered the fact that she couldn't blame her father for not being interested. She had a hard time getting excited over her photography assignments herself. Still…Adrianne thought about the silent resentful man and his bewildered mother and she kept on talking.

She told her father about Cass, her illness and recovery, the wheel chair on the porch, the braces she had to use to walk. She left out the part about Cass's boyfriend, the miscarriage, the recent cocaine addiction. She had already told him about Diane, so she didn't mention it again. He looked concerned about Cass, but didn't say anything. Instead, he turned toward the window and said, "This is the kind of bright day that makes too much glare. Breezy."
Adrianne was used to her father speaking in disconnected sentences and words. He was patting his hands on the table, looking for the coffee creamer that came in a little plastic container. She took his hand and placed it on top of the creamer next to his coffee cup. "Here it is, Dad. Right here." Then taking it from him, she opened it and poured
half into his coffee cup, just the way he liked it.

Adrianne could not turn back the years. She could not return his sight.
She could not rescue her father. But she could take him shopping.
He needed to pick up a few things at the local Stalwart.
They drove until they reached a flat gray building with red letters that merged into the horizon. The parking lot seemed to stretch on forever. Shiny cars sat bumper to bumper. Sun glittered on chrome. Two L-shaped rows of stores edged the parking lot. The dollar store, where Adrianne's father liked to browse the cluttered aisles for
treasures, was next to the money store. "FREE CHECKING" flashed in bright green. When she was a child, this had been a large vacant field. Wind-colored kites had flown above it. Every winter the fire department turned on wide hoses and made a lake, the water freezing into thousands of white lines sketched by skate blades.
Adrianne had skated until the sky soared through her.
The years were gone and so was the lake.
Adrianne and her father walked down the sidewalk next to the stores. When they reached the last small storefront-next to the horizon-long Stalwart-a modest sign, black lettering on white, read:

Dante Alighieri's
Pizzeria and Fine Dining

Adrianne had been to Stalwart several times before but she had never seen this sign or the Pizzeria. Stores disappeared. New ones sprung up overnight. But this one looked like it had been around forever. She looked through the smudged plate glass window. The interior was dingy, gray walls, sagging red-seated booths shaped by years of well-padded bodies. A short-order cook stood in front of the grill, a stained white apron knotted around his waist. His arms were sinewy-muscles precise as those of a rower or a charioteer. He moved the metal scraper forwards, backwards. His muscles rippled, but the grill did not get any cleaner.

Adrianne was mesmerized by the futility of his rhythms.

He was her Virgil, welcoming her to the gates of hell with cheese steaks and fried onions. Even though she was standing outside, she could feel the sizzle, the heat. She walked past the pizzeria with her father and the glass doors of Stalwart swung open. She had tried in vain to talk to her father about Stalwart's unfair labor practices. Adrianne's father was a union man. He had paid his dues, stood in picket lines, and marched in the nation's capital protesting the free trade agreements that were putting people like him out of work. All of this was undermined by Stalwart's low prices and the monthly breakfast free to senior citizens who were veterans.

Adrianne's father was one of the most stubborn people she knew. The other one was the Familiar Stranger. She thought about what Cass had said to her: That's a shame. You married your father. She followed her father through the double doors. That's the way hell is, she thought. Sometimes you just have to go there. Inside, a high gray ceiling spanned miles of countertops, boxes piled on boxes, cardboard displays. To her left was a snack bar. Ice clattered. Hot-dogs sizzled. Popcorn popped. In the midst of the din, Dante whispered into Adrianne's ear.

Through me one goes into the dolorous city.
Through me one goes into eternal woe.
Through me one goes among the lost people.

She walked past a shelf full of laptops secured with padlocked cables that looped around and through them. She stopped at one computer and idly clicked on the Internet browser. Realizing that she could get onto the Internet, she looked quickly around and then entered her web mail address and then her password. Her heat beat faster. Curiosity had gotten the best of her. She needed to know if The One had replied to her e-mail. She didn't know what to expect or if she would be able to live up to the promise she had made: I will fly to you.

She steeled herself for the worst, no reply, or a polite response. But as she clicked on The One's reply, she heard the Sirens. They were calling her from their rocky coastline shrouded in mist and edged with the skeletons of those who had gone before. Come to us, come to us, leave your bleached bones with the others. Leave everything and come. And there it was-- her answer, The One, writing to her, I'm looking forward to seeing you, love… Adrianne recoiled at the love bit - it was way too soon for that, but her heart grew wings. It soared.

"Can I help you ma'am?" The sales clerk had come out of nowhere. Adrianne clicked on the X at the top of her e-mail and then the X on the larger screen. The computer screen was back to its desktop.

"I need a light bulb." Adrianne's father was impatient. He was on a mission for a 60 watt bulb. Adrianne asked the clerk for directions to the light bulb section. She wasn't sure she could follow all of the twists and turns but she wandered off in the general direction of the light bulbs, first going through the hardware section.

The e-mail from The One sent her into a swoon. Surrounded by aluminum ladders, vise grips, and wooden dowels, she wondered that she had never before seen the sexual possibilities of these objects. She was naked and splayed across the aluminum ladder, The One taking her wrist-gently-and tying it to an upper rung. Her ankles were tied too, a thin strap a desire holding each in place. A single kiss splayed her. She was held in a vise grip. The moisture meter was in danger of ringing alarms. Adrianne stood in front of the French Curl Tool Rest for Wood Lathers (a long metal rod with a horizontal attachment on top, the edge curled and smooth, running in both directions).

She suppressed a moan.

In the Center of all this, the face of The One was suddenly replaced with that of her favorite student in the Thursday night class continuing education class. She was new to teaching, to being revered, to having a "pet." His sinewy shoulders were boyishly smooth. His girlish hips were narrow and supple. He waited for her every week after class and stood so close to her that there arms touched. His skin was warm and smooth. He was an adult-barely at 19 or 20--but he was still her student and off limits.

She remembered that she was looking for a light bulb.
Adrianne and her father walked past a bank of TVs stacked one on top of the other, each of them turned to the same channel. The sound was down and the picture on each screen was of an SUV driving from the ocean, through the waves onto a beach. Adrianne's mind was filled with a whirring, the beating of wings turning into whispers whispering:

Before me there were not things created.
Except eternal, and I endure in eternity:
Leave every hope, ye who enter.

Adrianne and her father circled Stalwart looking for light bulbs. They found dog bones, sweaters, sporting gear, and electronic massagers, ostensibly for tired backs and aching feet. There was an entire aisle of lawnmowers, some that you had to push, others with spacious seats that let you drive.
Adrianne, with her two good eyes, was no better than her father at finding her way through circles of things, things. The items on the shelves started to look familiar. They had passed this way before. Adrianne was desperate for something to hold on to.
She spied a familiar object jutting into the aisle.
"Do you need a toilet seat, Dad?"
"No."
"Are you sure? Look, here's a white one with a pink rose."
"I need a light bulb."

They wandered the aisles like lost souls. Pots and pans with dark bottoms and painted sides-blue, red-hung from the walls, blocking the light like a swarm of locusts. Stainless steel pot lids gleamed like mythical shields. Next to this, everything was Teflon. Teflon skillets. Teflon saucepans. Teflon coated Teflon.

Adrianne and her father kept walking and finally they reached the light bulbs. Glass bulbs, piles atop one another and stacked side by side, in paper casings, looked like a honeycomb. One hundred and fifty types of light bulbs and they didn't have the kind he wanted. He needed a regular 60 watt light bulb.

They would have to go to another store.

They circled back. Adrianne had passed through some of the aisles before and now on her return she remembered some of them. Others she had never seen before. They passed a wall of can openers. Adrianne took one from a peg-a manual metal can opener with blue plastic on the handles-and put it in her cart.

In another aisle she discovered pens. There were more pens then she had ever seen before in one place. Adrianne could not resist buying pens. She reached and selected a pack for herself and one for her father. She couldn't decide which type of pens she liked best so she just picked the packs that were closest. "You need these, don't you?"

Her father studied the small print on the package. Then he looked at the price listed on the shelf underneath. He bent over, peeled the sign off the shelf, stood up, peered at it, bent over and pressed it back. Just to make sure, he leaned over and checked the price again. Hell was exhausting. Her father put the pens back on the shelf.
"They're overcharging."

The package of pens was twenty cents more than he wanted to pay. Adrianne was exasperated. Then she remembered that her father had worked three and a half decades of shift work for his pension. He didn't give up his years easily.

Adrianne picked up the pens. Twenty-four came in a pack. She turned and said, "I'll give you half."
Her father nodded.
Past the pen section was paper. Reams. There were sixty-sheet spiral-bound one-subject notebooks. Yellow. Green. Purple. Other notebooks were three times that width, thick and spiral bound. Adrianne's reached out when she saw the Composition Books, marbled black and white covers and black bindings. She put three of them into her cart.

They went to stand in the checkout line and as Adrianne waited she opened her pack of pens and flipped open a notebook. The page was pristine. Her thoughts swirled across it like skate blades. She ignored the lines, turned the notebook sideways and thought about what she would write. She wondered if she would write down "The One," with weighty thick letters-- branding the paper with its mark. She could write down the name of the Familiar Stranger, beginning a letter that began with "I'm sorry." She leaned forward, rested her elbows on the handle of her cart, dropping her head into her hands. Her neck was suddenly flushed. Fine beads of perspiration broke out on her
forehead.
Was it a hot flash or the end of the world?
She needed to go home. But where was home?
Adrianne looked at the blank page again. She listened intently to the swirl of voices in her mind and wrote down the only thing she could: Diane. One name evoked another: Helen, Thea, Dana, Art. Then she wrote down another name: Adrianne.
When she looked up she saw a heavy-set woman ringing up people's purchases. Her shoulders sloped forward as she scanned the items and at the same time she carried on a conversation with a younger woman who stood in front of the checkout line. Adrianne inched up and saw that the younger woman gripped the metal handles of a baby carriage. "Look," said the woman, putting one hand into the carriage and pointing at the cashier with the other, "there's grandma."

Adrianne felt a pang of emptiness. She missed her mother. She wanted something. A daughter? A baby? No, she decided. That wouldn't be enough. She wanted to return to a place and time that no longer existed. Somewhere, in the recesses of her mind, there was moonlight rippling on water. It could have been a bright ribbon, but Adrianne knew it was a lifeline and the only way and the only way she could stop the moon from disappearing forever was to hold on tight. She looked down at her handwriting in the notebook she was about to buy and one name stood out:
Thea.

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