I can’t remember who thought of taking the old truck for a drive first. Probably me. I hated sitting around that house. I was angry at all of them for having moved my grandmother up from the little country town where she had always lived to this perfectly groomed matchbox house if the suburbs of the big city. This house didn’t resemble my grandmother at all. She was supposed to be surrounded by vegetable gardens, wild flowers, raspberry bushes and her banty chicks.
My cousin and I were amusing ourselves with a pack of cards after lunch while the three sisters; aunts and mothers, finished up the dishes. Between the slap of the cards as we shuffled and dealt, I can still hear them discussing the move.
“Someone has to watch out after her. You know how lost she is without Papa.” said Aunt Gladys, “We’re only a block away in case she needs anything.”
“She’s simply too old to live by herself and take care of Evy.” Said my mother. Evy was my invalid aunt, Evelyn, who had always lived with my grandmother.
Then Aunt Mildred chimed in, “It’s just to far a trip down there now that all of us are living in the city. None of us has the time to spend driving down there each week to check up on her.”
This was all said at once. Whenever the three of them got together, whether they were fixing dinner, canning pickles, or quilting, they all spoke at the same time without waiting for a response.
I suppose that’s what happens when you grow up in a family of nine kids. In order to make yourself heard, you just say what’s on your mind. It didn’t matter what the others were saying, no one was listening to anyone else. They were just interested in their own thoughts. That’s part of the advantage of being family, you can talk to yourself out loud and no one thinks you’re any the stranger. I’d gotten used to hearing them talk like that and had become a master at following three conversations without getting confused.
On this particular day, they were all trying to justify their reasons for moving my grandmother; a discussion, which I assumed, was primarily for my benefit, as I was the only one who objected to the move.
Looking back, in all honesty, my reasons for not wanting my grandmother to move were as selfish as theirs. The small country town where she lived was a place where a city girl could shine. In the big city, I was lost among my peers. They never noticed me; I was just the plain little girl who always had her nose in a book. But when I visited my grandmother it was different. I could walk down the street, in my tight pedal pushers and crop top, and all of the farm boys, who came to town on a Saturday afternoon to lean on their trucks, loafing around the town square, would whistle at me. They noticed me. They noticed my pseudo-sophistication. They were impressed…it felt good. Nothing I could do back in the city would impress my classmates in the same way.
So I was a little angry that they’d taken away my once chance to shine. There was however, another side to my resistance to the move that wasn’t quite all selfish. I loved my grandmother, and I felt like at her age, if you took a fish out of water, it wouldn’t live long. Turns out I was right, but that day none of us knew that.
After two games of hearts, listening to them as they fumbled all over each other in my grandmothers new but minuscule kitchen, my cousin and I looked at each other.
“Let’s go!” I said.
“Where?”
“Anywhere. You know your way around here, don’t you?”
“Oh, sure.”
“So, where does everyone hang out?”
“Oh, over on Third there’s Paul‘s drive-in.” She started to clean up as I put away the cards. “I always see a lot of kids there.”
“Anything’s better than sitting around here.”
My cousin was one year younger and had lost her place to shine also. She had moved from the same country town to the city just the year before, so she was a real outcast in her school. Neither one of us was really sure of our identity. We were both struggling, both knowing that no matter how hard we tried, we were both always going to be a little on the homely side. No one was ever going to make us homecoming queen, prom queen, anything like that.
It was that time of year too. Late August. School was going to be starting in two more weeks, and we had to face our recurring reality; once again we were going to be on the outside looking in. Taking off, grabbing a bit of freedom, checking out the local drive-in would be a salve to our wounds…wounded pride or approaching wounded pride, whichever it might be. So, we decided we would go for a coke, anything to escape the confines of that house…assert ourselves!
Borrow the car, that’s what we wanted to do. But that was immediately vetoed by our aunt.
That’s a brand new car. You guys aren’t going to take it to any drive-in.”
So we were stuck with the only alternative, which was the truck. Oh, how I was embarrassed by that truck. It was a 1939 international, one of the last vehicles, I think, made before the war. Nobody I knew had a 1939 International. It was probably the only one left. It was so old that it had been made back in the days when the windshields opened. There was a crank on the dash that you could turn and the windshield would open straight out. That was the only redeeming feature about that truck. It gave you the same sense of freedom as in a convertible, except that you had to be careful or things like bugs would blow in your eyes or even worse, in your mouth.
It was black. Someone had taken it and tried to soup it up. They had taken old bed rails; old iron bed rails, painted them shiny white, and attached them to the back sides of the truck in order to make the sides higher. If you stood up in the back of the truck, it looked like you were in jail. It also had four white wall tires which looked stupid on such an old truck, a white wall wheel mounted on the right side of the truck, and running boards.
The same person that attached the bed rails had also taken the bench seat out of the cab and put in bucket seats. This would have been real cool, except that they were Volkswagen seats, and maroon leather at that. The truck also had a gearshift on the floor which wasn’t cool either. Gearshifts were only on the column in those days. So by and large, although the truck was a source of pride to my father, it was an embarrassment to anyone else who had to drive it.
Years later in the 60’s, after I had graduated from college and had been living on my own for a couple of years in the city, I remember borrowing the truck once again. I was much more sophisticated by that time, so I was even more aware of its inadequacies. I was not however, so sophisticated or wealthy, I should say, as to be able to afford a mover, so my roommate and I were moving from apartment to apartment with all of our worldly goods stashed in the back of the truck. My brother, who was helping with the move, was sitting on top of all of our possessions, trying to hold things down. As we passed some kids sitting on their steps, one of them yelled and pointed us out to the others, “Hey, look, there goes a bunch of ‘furriners’.” Forever planting the vision of Jethro and Ellie Mae Clampett in my mind.
And as if that embarrassing image wasn’t enough for two teenage girls to handle, it wasn’t very easy to drive either. It had a starter button on the floor that you had to press with your left foot while your right foot was on the clutch. It required some acrobatics to get it started. But, it was our only source of freedom….you take what you can get.
There is only so much time you can spend at a drive-in drinking a coke. Neither one of us wanted to go back and face the incessant repartee of our mothers and aunts, so we decided we would go for a drive.
Cities were different then, in the late 50’s. They ended abruptly. Suburban sprawl hadn’t overtaken and destroyed all of the rural roads leading out of them, and there were still a lot of farms that surrounded the cities. Although some had already been abandoned, there were still plenty of old gravel roads that you could drive down. Probably trying to recapture some of the small town that had been abandoned by our family so recently, my cousin and I set off down some of these beckoning roads.
The thing I always liked about country roads was that you didn’t have to know where they were going to take one. You just started down one and wherever it led, you went. You didn’t have to worry about them turning into dead ends, they didn’t have cul-de-sacs then. Occasionally one would stop, but when it did it always ended at another road, so you just had to make the decision as to whether you wanted to turn left or right and you continued on your journey. They always had names like County Road H, County Road BB. Nothing fancy, but if you had the time, and didn’t care where you were going; they were a great way to pass the day.
It was that time of year when all of the late summer flowers were in bloom. The Indian Paint Brush was strewn by the sides of the road along with Queen Ann’s lace and Bachelor Buttons, which bloomed past their prime. They were joined by Yarrow, the old-fashioned Yarrow that is white, not the yellow, and Coneflowers, with their dark centers and drooping pink petals. Somehow I always thought that they should be married to the Indian Paint Brush. They went so well together. Even a few wild Daisies were still in bloom and Black-eyed Susans, thousand and thousands of Black-eyed Susans. They lined all of the roads as we drove down them.
The flowers were so inviting that finally my cousin suggested that we stop the truck and pick some to take back to my grandmother. So we picked a few, enough for a bouquet, drove on, found another meadow that we couldn’t resist and picked a few more.
Finally, we had our hands full, but unable to resist the next meadow, we picked some more and threw them in the back of the truck. After that, we drove down the road, picking flowers, putting them in the bead of the truck because there was no other place to hold them.
Somewhere along the line, I must have dawdled too long when my cousin wanted to drive ahead. I was always the dawdler. “I’m leaving.” She yelled as she got in the truck and started off. So I ran after the truck, jumped on the running board and held on as she slowly drove down the road.
“Hey, if you go a little slower,” I told her, “I can just pick the flowers as we drive along.”
And sure enough, by slowing down to a crawl, I could stand on the running board, holding on to the door handle with one hand, harvesting all the flowers I wanted. As we moved down the country lanes, we took turns doing this, each of us picking lowers as we went along and throwing them in the back of the truck.
It takes a long time to fill up the back of an old ’39 International with flowers. But we did. I’ll never forget the sight of the back of that truck. Pinks, yellow, blues and whites. An absolute bed of wild flowers.
Finally, we pulled off the side of the road. Actually we pulled into a deserted driveway. There were a lot of those out in the country in those days. I suppose there still are if you could find the country. Anyway, we pulled into a driveway and both of us climbed into the back of the truck and just lay there, surrounded by all of the wild flowers, feeling prettier than any homecoming queen had ever felt. We stayed for the longest time, staring up at the blue, blue, late summer sky, dreaming those special dreams usually reserved for times when we were by ourselves….being Cinderella, kissed by the prince….maybe more like Sleeping Beauty, waiting to be awakened. We knew we were as beautiful as anyone else on that day. All we needed was for someone to see that beauty and awaken it in us.
We went home, past fields turning gold in the waning summer sun, to our grandmother’s house where she ran to meet us like the young girl she had once been, while our mothers and aunts stood arms-folded on the porch. We filled her house one last time with our flowers and youthful dreams.
My parents eventually sold the ’39 International. It’s probably rusting away in a junkyard somewhere. Any other remains of that day are tucked someplace in the backs of our minds.
My cousin married, had three kids, and lives in one of those suburban tract houses.
I’m still searching for my prince, still searching for someone who will look at me and see what I look like lying on a bed of wild flowers.
