Home On the Range (an excerpt)
Penny placed her palm against the cool, dirty window of the bus, steadying herself as the Greyhound shuddered to a stop in front of Sherman's Feed and Seed. The driver pulled up the creaking parking brake.
"Twenty minutes, folks."
The door clattered open and fresh air swirled around Penny's face. When she drew her legs up to tie the frayed laces of her sneakers, her stomach gripped and heaved. She held still, waiting for the spasm to subside. She hadn't eaten since she boarded in Bakersfield, since Al had shoved that last rock-hard pumpernickel bagel at her with one hairy hand, the other shaking in her face as he nagged her not to talk to strangers on the bus.
Penny chewed her fingernails and held her stomach, which was whining like a sad dog. She would have to lift some food at this store. She gauged the distance between the bus and the wooden porch in long-legged footsteps, about six. She'd have to time it right, wait till just before the bus
took off for the open road.
To kill time, Penny took out the map Al had given her and spread it across her blue-jeaned knees, trying to guess where she was. She’d lost track about twenty stops ago, maybe since crossing the California border.
Black bagel crumbs rested in a crease from the Pacific to Albuquerque. Al's fat pencil marked the rest of the route to New York, ending in a curlicue and an arrow leading off the continent into the Atlantic, where Al had written "Eugenia" but had crossed it off and written "Ruth" and an address in Brooklyn. He couldn't remember his cousin's name, or which cousin he was actually remembering, but that didn't seem to dampen his belief that the cousin -- Eugenia or Ruth -- would take Penny in with open arms.
Penny licked her finger and blotted up the crumbs. She doubted she would make it all the way, but it didn't really matter . . . she didn't believe there were any cousins there anyway.
A telephone line sagged from the store like an empty clothesline waiting for someone to come home. Further away, a tiny flash of lightning against a low brown hill caught Penny's gaze. Then a rumble of thunder. Penny knelt on her seat and pressed Al's Brownie camera against the window, waiting for the next streak. Above the hill now, a bright fracture in the sky, and Penny began to count, "One-chim-pan-zee-two-chim-pan-zees." Through the viewfinder was the southwest—maybe Texas, which was halfway to Kansas City, halfway again to New York, as Al had explained.
"Whatsa matter with you!" he had shouted over the high counter, waving his spatula, rocking back and forth on his feet, laughing. "Don't you know anything? Ha!"
They were having one of their endless trivia battles and Penny fumbled when Al asked where the Midwest began.
"Big deal," she spat back. "So I don't know where the god-damn-mid-fuckin-west is. You can't spell worth shit."
"Oh yeah? Shit? Ha! S-H-I-T!" he bellowed, flipping an egg right off the stove. It landed on the floor. No wonder customers never came back.
And it wasn't just the yelling and how the little diner -- Home On the Range -- was always out of things, like mustard for the pastrami and sugar for the corn flakes. It was the service, too. Somehow Penny and Al had gotten into the habit -- during slow periods, which was just about always -- of playing Scrabble and pretending not to notice when customers came in, sharing an unspoken hope that the customer would give up from lack of service and leave them to their game. Even after two years, Penny was still surprised when a customer just wouldn't give up but sat patiently, five, ten, even fifteen minutes until Penny couldn’t stand it anymore and would call over her shoulder, "Coffee?", rising with exaggerated fatigue, as if her eighteen-year-old back had seen better days. She hated leaving Al alone with the Scrabble board. He cheated, looked at her letters, moved esses around on the squares.
The biggest fight they had ever gotten into was over Scrabble. The Santa Ana winds had blown hard for three days straight and there was no one in the diner the whole time but Penny and Al. They were in the middle of their fifth straight game. Al had heaped a plate with French fries, garlicky dill pickles and boiled eggs, balancing a monkey dish of Thousand Island on top. They sat at their little table halfway between the door and the kitchen, hands dipping into the food in turns like oil derricks, concentration high. Al hunched over the playing board. Penny could smell the Brylcreem he raked through his salt and pepper hair, faking a shower, his humped nose sweaty and sprouting wires. He breathed hard, snorting sometimes like a horse, rocking on his hips from too much energy, or coffee.
Penny had a word for the red triple score square and she was going to win again. She lit a cigarette to break his concentration as he rubbed his cheek—smoother than it ought to be for a man of sixty, Penny thought again. Must be all the booze. Works like a preservative.
Al covered his mouth with his big, thick fingers, black lowering brows shading his eyes as he studied the wooden tiles.
"Ah!" he nodded suddenly. "Aha!"
Al spread his arms out then slapped his hands together, rubbing them fast. He coughed. He sucked his teeth.
"Come on, Al, just put the god-damn word down."
With his pinky finger extended as if he were picking up a teacup, Al delicately placed his tiles—M-I-T-Z-V-A-H—across the red square so that the "z" landed on a double letter score. "Ten! Twenty! Thirty! Plus--."
"It's a foreign word."
"What?"
"It's a foreign word! You can't use foreign words."
"What the hell are you talking about!" Al shouted, his mouth and eyes perfectly round. "Mitzvah! Mitzvah! Since when is mitzvah a foreign word?"
"It's not English!" Penny cried. "I don’t know what it is, but it's not English. It's not even a word, far's I can tell!"
"Not a word? Not a word? Oy vay!" Al stood up, hands pressed against his temples. "That's it! I've had it!"
Al flipped up the board. Beige tiles bounced off the table. A "v" disappeared into the pink dressing.
"God-damn goy says mitzvah isn't a word!" Al stomped away from the table. "Skinny little gentile waitress thinks she knows!"
Penny lit another cigarette, not noticing the one already burning in the ashtray.
Al threw a cup. It bounced twice then shattered. He pulled at his hair as he strode up and down the diner, shouting at the ceiling. "Lousy bit of eighteen-year-old trash calls me a foreigner? Tells me mitzvah is not a word? Un-fuckin’-believable!"
"Would you quit yelling!" Penny followed him in circles. "I'm just telling you, it's not English!" Penny reached for the pitcher of ice water, but thought better of it. She sat back down at the table, trying to calm things down. She didn't want him to fire her again. It wasn't so bad when the weather was cool, sitting out on the porch, counting the wild desert lilies out by the road, waiting for Al to change his mind. But the winds outside were carrying debris from the road -- scraps of paper, pebbles, dirt -- in horizontal gusts past the screen door. While Al yelled that he knew what for, Penny imagined sitting by the side of the road, covering her eyes, the wind piling up sand along her body like a dune.
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