The Sky Beneath My Feet

Chapter 14


Thelma & Louise





Remember the scene in It’s a Wonderful Life where George Bailey is looking for a suitcase to take on his travels, one that’s big enough for a thousand and one nights with room for labels from everywhere from Italy to Samarkand? And the guy behind the counter pulls one out and says, “It’s yours.” George’s old boss, Mr. Gower, is footing the bill. The suitcase even has his name inscribed on it.

Miss Hannah was a big fan of It’s a Wonderful Life.

In addition to serving as a doctor in Korea—which was nothing like M⋆A⋆S⋆H, she was always quick to point out—she was a world traveler, having trekked through Southeast Asia at the behest of various charities and aid agencies throughout the sixties and early seventies. Under her influence, I imagined myself taking similar journeys. When I graduated high school, she presented me with an old-fashioned Hartmann suitcase, tan leather with fancy dividers inside the compartments, and my initials underneath the handle.

I find the suitcase up in the attic collecting dust. Bringing it down the pull-ladder, I wipe away the accumulated age and open the thing up for the first time in years. Inside are some of my old notebooks, the letters and cards Rick wrote before we were married, an old term paper with a red “A” inked on the front.

“You’re bringing that?” Jed asks in surprise. “What about Dad’s suitcase, the one with the rollers?”

He’s trying to help, but he doesn’t understand.

“No, this will do.”

After cleaning it up, I sniff the lining. A little musty, but not too bad. My clothes are already folded on the bed, along with a zippered plastic bag full of makeup and toiletries. Once everything’s inside, there is still plenty of room. I’m tempted to stick the painting in before closing the lid. Bad idea. The whole point is to pack light. Don’t take anything you’ll later regret.

Since Jed keeps hovering, I put him to use. “Go get my sunglasses out of the car. I’m going to need them down there.”

I think it flattered Miss Hannah, the thought that I was her young protégé. By the time she came back to the States, her parents were gone and her only sibling, a younger brother suffering from his son’s suicide, needed her. Because she’d been so close to my grandmother, her college roommate, my mother pretty much adopted her. She was in her late sixties when I knew her, but not at all frail.

There’s a reason they make suitcases out of nylon these days. The old Hartmann weighs a ton. Wrestling it down the stairs, I have to lean left to compensate. Jed meets me by the front door with my white sunglasses, which I stick on my head.

“Are you going to miss me?”

“It’ll be kind of strange.”

“If anything happens, you know your father is out back. Don’t feel like you can’t disturb him. You can call my cell phone if you need me, and I put the number where we’ll be on the fridge too.”

“It’ll be fine. Don’t worry.”

“And, Jed, I want you to keep an eye on your brother.”

He nods gravely, making me wonder how much he knows. I would ask, but if he doesn’t know about the marijuana, I would just as soon keep it that way. No point in giving him ammunition to use against Eli in their next fight, which is exactly what he would do. Boys will be boys.

“I asked Deedee if she would look in on you, so don’t be surprised if she drops by.”

“Nothing’s gonna happen,” he says.

“And, Jed, if you bring Marlene over here . . . be a gentleman, okay?”

“Mom!”

“Stay downstairs and don’t hole up in your room. Try to think about appearances.”

His cheeks flush red and he starts to push me out the door. The sunlight blinds me for a second, until I can flip my sunglasses down. Holly pulls up behind the wheel of Eric’s convertible, giving the horn a tap.

“Give me a kiss,” I say. “Tell Eli to call me.”

Before I’m down the driveway, he has already closed the front door. Holly bounces up and gives me a hug. She smells of suntan lotion and perfume.

“We’re gonna have a blast,” she says.

In the trunk, there are already three expensive-looking cases, the kind you see in glossy magazines being carried by models who travel in private jets. “You said you were packing light.”

“What?” she says. “I had to bring a few things.”

I slide the Hartmann in on top, trying not to leave any scratches on Holly’s bags, which probably cost more than the chairs in Eric’s office. Before I get in the passenger seat, I shrug my leather coat off too. The last thing I want is to catch a rivet or buckle on that plush interior. The door shuts with an airtight seal. Everything is quiet in our little bubble.

“Am I really doing this?”

“Yes, you are. Do you have the keys?”

I reach through the seats into my coat pocket, producing the yellow floaty from which dangles the beach house key.

“Let’s do it!” She pushes a button to start the engine. On the dashboard, a big control screen lights up. I’ve never been inside a car this nice, let alone taken a road trip. I bet it has power steering and brakes that work too.

“I feel like I’m abandoning ship.”

“You need a vacation, Beth. This is gonna be great.”

As we roar down the street, I watch my little house disappear in the side-view mirror. Remember: you’re traveling light, leaving the baggage behind. No shed, no weed, no St. Rick staring at you in your sleep. No guilt about leaving either. No pseudo-nuns slapping you down just for trying to help. No big church with big screens. No mirrors with strangers looking back at you, strangers who used to be you.

Ahead of you, there’s a long strip of sand and a blue-green infinity, crashing waves that come not from a sleep machine but from the actual crash of actual waves. Sun on skin and long hours of doing absolutely nothing. Two women who are lonely in their marriages but not alone, escaping from the world that won’t give them everything and won’t let them feel content with what they have.

“Wait,” I say. “I forgot my swimsuit.”

“Seriously? Never mind. We’ll take care of it along the way.”





Fifteen hours is a lot of time on the road. An hour to D.C., just settling in. Two more hours to Richmond, where we stop for lunch and end up talking about Jim and Kathie Shaw, and what it would be like if Rick did take the job and we moved down here. “You claim you’d keep in touch,” Holly says, “but the Shaws said exactly the same thing.” We hit the outlet mall on the highway for a swimsuit. Resisting Holly’s peer pressure, I go with a one-piece. More resistance: I refuse to try it on and model for her. Not my thing.

Somewhere in North Carolina, six hours in, things take a turn for the silly. Holly confesses to having a crush on the Archbishop of Canterbury.

“Ever since the Royal Wedding,” she says. “That voice. Those eyebrows.”

“You do have a thing for older men.”

Say what you want about air travel. There’s something liberating about the open road, whether you experience it by bus, by ancient Volkswagen, or riding shotgun in the übercool car of the future. Midafternoon in Fayetteville, North Carolina: Holly stops for gas and pushes the magic button that folds the convertible top away. For nearly an hour, we blast eighties music and let the wind whip our hair—mine practically blinding me when I don’t hold the tangles back, Holly’s so short it can barely tickle her cheek. By the time we reach the state line, the wind has battered us into temporary submission. She puts the top up and in the silence that follows, we both look at each other like we’re nineteen again.

“This is fun,” I say.

“What did I tell you?”

Stacy’s beach house lies on the Atlantic coast of Florida somewhere between Jacksonville and St. Augustine. The GPS screen on the dashboard counts down the miles, updating our time of arrival, ensuring that during every moment of the journey we have a sense of forward progress.

Through South Carolina, we rehash the events of the past month, with Holly telling me once again how sorry she is about the results of Eric’s investigation into Mission Up.

“It’s the kind of thing we should be doing,” she says by way of encouragement. “We’re always sending people on short-term mission trips halfway around the globe, taking up collections to sink wells in Africa, and right on our doorstep, right under our very noses . . .” She throws her hands up, stumped by the inexpressible depth of need all around us. “Not that those things aren’t important. I know they are. But what does it say about us that trouble abroad elicits our sympathy while trouble at home just makes us want to lock our doors?”

Not knowing how to answer, I somehow find myself telling her about Miss Hannah, something I’ve never done before.

“She spent most of her life halfway around the globe,” I say, “but for her, it wasn’t about the distance as much as just doing something.”

“Was she a medical missionary?” Holly asks.

“Not so much a missionary. It wasn’t about winning converts, more like patching people up. We never talked about it, but I imagine she would have considered ‘saving souls’ as above her pay grade. She was there to stitch up the wounds.”

“That’s important too.”

I know it’s important. That goes without saying. The fact that Holly feels the need to say it aloud reflects how warped, how disoriented we have become.

Let me be honest. On the subject of my pre-evangelical past, I tend to be tight-lipped, even with Holly. Originally embarrassment kept me from talking. After meeting Rick, I’d come to see the worldly piety of my youth as insincere. How can you care for a person’s body, his physical needs, when what’s important is the soul? The goodness of someone like Miss Hannah, who made people well without thinking to rescue them from hell, became problematic for me. I felt like this was obvious to the real Christian, and was ashamed it had taken me so long to realize it.

Now, though, I keep my counsel for different reasons. All I have to do to make Rick’s eyes roll is mention my Quaker upbringing. I stay quiet because I don’t care to hear the criticism anymore. Even Holly’s need to assure me that Miss Hannah’s work had value gets on my nerves.

“Let me ask you something,” I say. “Why is it that we talk about the importance of bodily resurrection, then act like our greatest bliss in life will be to shuffle off this mortal coil and float around like disembodied ghosts? Just because the body and the spirit aren’t the same thing doesn’t mean they aren’t intertwined. If our bodies didn’t matter, why’d God give them to us in the first place?”

“So we could buy clothes?”

“I’m serious, Holly. How can we talk so spiritualistic and be so materialistic? What’s the verse about the poor person coming to the door, and instead of giving them food, you say, ‘God bless you’? I think that’s what we do more often than not, and to feel better about it, we make donations or build a Habitat house.”

“Or try to, anyway.”

“Exactly.”

“You’re preaching to the choir, sister.”

“I’m preaching to myself. I’m guilty of this. What you said the other day about marriage, I think it’s right. You want a stable relationship, and you don’t get that by constantly nitpicking it, scrutinizing every little thing. But that’s exactly what we’re taught to do with God, isn’t it? Scrutinize the relationship, make sure it’s good enough, make sure we’re doing everything that’s expected and getting everything out of him that we want. If you spend all your time on that, what’s left over for the rest of the world?

“That’s the problem, isn’t it? That’s what keeps us cloistered in our little groups, insulated, always going deeper and deeper inside ourselves and finding less and less there. That’s what drives a guy like Rick into the shed and cuts him off from his wife and his kids. Thinking he’ll find God if he can just shut the world out. But what if God’s waiting . . . not in here”—tapping my chest—“but out there?”

“I’ve never heard you talk this way, Beth.”

“That’s because I never do.”

“You should,” she says. “I like it.”





In Savannah, we switch drivers. I’m petrified at first, but the car ends up working more or less the way they all do. As long as I don’t touch anything on the center console or the dash, confining myself to holding the wheel and pushing on the gas or brake, I figure I’ll be fine. My voice is scratchy from talking, and Holly’s worn out, so she takes a nap while I listen to the radio. Eventually we leave the station’s range and I listen to static instead, afraid to delve into the mysteries of channel changing.

We reach the beach house just before midnight, stopping along the way at a convenience store for groceries. While Holly sleeps, I run inside, grabbing juice and snacks, a box of swimsuit-unfriendly donuts, extra suntan lotion, some Diet Cokes. I try for some bottled water, but the store is sold out. Not surprising. The shelves are half empty as it is, like there’s been a run on fat-filled, carcinogenic treats. The guy behind the counter looks as worn out as I feel. He stares right through me, communicating in nothing but grunts.

I let Holly sleep until we’re at our destination.

Confession: I’ve never been to a beach house before. I always imagine them up on stilts, overlooking the sand and maybe a bonfire. During the past few miles, I’ve observed what look like condominiums along the oceanfront, stoking my sense of disappointment. Spending a few days in what amounts to a modern apartment block by the water . . . well, it’s not very romantic, is it?

Stacy’s beach house does not disappoint. For one thing, it’s a tiny place, freestanding, separated from the road by a weathered picket fence. There’s no garage, just a corrugated carport, the back end open to the glistening, moonlit ocean. No houses on either side, so there’s plenty of privacy. We’re on a small ridge overlooking the beach, and Stacy’s place seems to be nestled on the one spot amenable to construction. The ground on either side slopes precipitously down to the beach. The lights of the nearest neighbor are about a mile down the road.

“Wake up, Holly. We’re here.”

Her eyes pop open. She sits upright. “This is it? I thought it would be bigger.”

When I get out of the car, a balmy wind hits me full in the face. My clothes ripple against my body and the smell of salt fills my nostrils. True to my fantasy, I can hear the white noise of waves churning onto land. I’ll sleep tonight with the window open, listening to that sound.

Holly opens the trunk only to have it snap shut, blown back by the force of the wind.

“Kind of windy, huh?”

She has a stupid grin on her face. I look at my reflection in the window. I have the same stupid grin on mine.