My Life on the Road Read Online Free Page B

of all life. That conveys the fatefulness of it—but not the joy.
    Years later, I saw a movie about a prostituted woman in Paris who saves money to take her young daughter on a vacation by the sea. As their train full of workers rounds a cliff, the shining limitless waters spread out beneath them—and suddenly all the passengers begin to laugh, throw open the windows, and toss out cigarettes, coins, lipstick: everything they thought they needed a moment before.
    This was the joy I felt as a wandering child. Whenever the road presents me with its greatest gift—a moment of unity with everything around me—I still do.
    —
    A NOTHER TRUTH OF MY EARLY WANDERINGS is harder to admit: I longed for a home. It wasn’t a specific place but a mythical neat house with conventional parents, a school I could walk to, and friends who lived nearby. My dream bore a suspicious resemblance to the life I saw in movies, but my longing for it was like a constant low-level fever. I never stopped to think that children in neat houses and conventional schools might envy me.
    When I was ten or so, my parents separated. My sister was devastated, but I had never understood why two such different people were married in the first place. My mother often worried her way into depression, and my father’s habit of mortgaging the house, or otherwise going into debt without telling her, didn’t help. Also, wartime gas rationing had forced Ocean Beach Pier to close, and my father was on the road nearly full time, buying and selling jewelry and small antiques to make a living. He felt he could no longer look after my sometimes-incapacitated mother. Also, she wanted to live near my sister, who was finishing college in Massachusetts, and now I was old enough to be her companion.
    We rented a house in a small town, and spent most of one school year there. It was the most conventional life we would ever lead. After my sister graduated and left for her first grown-up job, my mother and I moved to East Toledo and an ancient farmhouse where her family had once lived. As with all inferior things, this part of the city was given an adjective while the rest stole the noun. What once had been countryside was crowded with the small houses of factory workers. They surrounded our condemned and barely habitable house on three sides, with a major highway undercutting its front porch and trucks that rattled our windows. Inside this remnant of her childhood, my mother disappeared more and more into her unseen and unhappy world.
    I was always worried that she might wander into the streets, or forget that I was in school and call the police to find me—all of which sometimes happened. Still, I thought I was concealing all this from my new friends. Most were quiet about their families for some reason, from speaking only Polish or Hungarian at home, to a father who drank too much or an out-of-work relative sleeping on the couch. By tacit agreement, we tended to meet on street corners. Only many years later would I meet a high school classmate who confessed that she had always worried about me, that my mother was called the Crazy Lady of the neighborhood.
    During those years, my mother told me more about her early life. Long before I was born, she had been a rare and pioneering woman reporter, work that she loved and had done so well that she was promoted from social reporting to Sunday editor for a major Toledo newspaper. She had stayed on this path for a decade after marrying my father, and six years after giving birth to my sister. She was also supporting her husband’s impractical dreams and debts, suffering a miscarriage and then a stillbirth, and falling in love with a man at work: perhaps the man she should have married. All this ended in so much self-blame and guilt that she suffered what was then called a nervous breakdown, spent two years in a sanatorium, and emerged with an even greater feeling of guilt for having left my sister in her father’s care. She also had