As an adult, I am mostly amused by and in many ways grateful for my socially oblivious childhood, so I was surprised to feel a flush of real embarrassment when I imagined C. looking at those photos. I understood, intellectually, that all of us have things in our past that make us cringe, and that real intimacy requires sharing them sooner or later. But she and I were still very much on the side of sooner, and I briefly wondered, there on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, if I could somehow slip away for a moment shortly after we arrived and mortification-proof my childhood home.
But that was impossible, of course. The pictures were hardly the only things troubling me, and the rest could not be hastily removed while C. was off chatting with my parents. There was the bedroom down the hall, still full of its childhood detritus (open the wrong cabinet and a jumble of Breyer horses, Billy Joel CDs, and marching band paraphernalia was liable to come crashing down on top on you); there was the house itself, which was large even for a family of four and unreasonably gigantic with just my parents living in it; and, least avoidable of all, there was the ritzy sweeping-lawns-and-Tudor-mansions town where it was located. The suburb of Cleveland where I was raised was a good place to grow up but also—as I have thought for as long as I have thought about such things—a good place to leave. The most accurate thing I can say about my feelings for my hometown is that they are mixed: somehow, it is simultaneously such a fundamental part of myself that I can’t imagine being me without it, yet so very unlike me that I can’t imagine ever choosing to live there.
That morning, driving west with C., I couldn’t stop picturing it through her eyes. It brought home, so to speak, another kind of difference between us, one that was as obvious as religion but had not clamored so urgently for my attention until we were headed straight toward it. C. grew up four hundred–odd miles and many cultural time zones from me, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland—that stranded little piece of the state that is part of the Delmarva Peninsula, bounded to the west by the Chesapeake Bay and to the east by the Atlantic Ocean. Until 1952, when the Bay Bridge was built, it took several hours to reach the mainland from her future hometown, with the result that the area developed like an island: slowly, distinctively, in relative isolation. In the decades since then, it has largely retained that early character, making it as culturally distant from as it is physically close to the Northeast Corridor.
Part of that cultural distance stems from its political geography. The northern border of Maryland lies flush with the Mason-Dixon Line, and life on the Eastern Shore, unlike in Bethesda or Baltimore, remains distinctly southern. It was the Shore that gave us those great patriots Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, while also giving us the men and women who enslaved them. The failure of Reconstruction to reconcile those parties and redress those wrongs lingers in the region, as in so much of the nation, in the form of persistent racial injustice, widespread de facto segregation, and scattered Confederate flags. But other and better southern influences linger on the Shore as well: in the instinct for hospitality; in the August-afternoon pace of life; in a population made up about equally of the congenitally reticent and natural raconteurs; in the elaborately preserved and frequently recited communal genealogies whereby So-and-so’s granddaddy worked with Great-uncle Jack on your mother’s side at that mechanic shop out on Hog Barn Road back before your Aunt Lula was born. The South or some part of it also lingers in the accent in which all this gets recounted, which sounds like the city of Pittsburgh sold off its consonants to the Carolinas. Whenever C. is around her family, she lapses back into it, and every time, it makes me want to kiss her.
Traditionally, most people on the Eastern Shore have made their living off the land or the water, but the construction of the Bay Bridge brought with it wealthy retirees and commuters seeking second homes on the water. Still, outside of a few small cities and some pockets of extraordinary affluence, the area remains largely rural and working-class. When I was growing up, my friends’ parents were doctors and psychologists, lawyers and business professors and petroleum engineers. The adults around C. were truck drivers and construction workers, farmers and watermen, welders and waitresses. Like ninety-five percent of the people in her hometown, neither of her parents went to college. Her mother worked as a mail carrier for the United States Postal Service and spent her free time helping C.’s father, who, to support the family, held down three or four jobs at a time: cleaning a bank, stocking a store, hauling trash, scrapping metal, landscaping and caretaking for the owners of those second homes.
The town where C. was born and raised is not, technically speaking, a town—just a census-designated area, consisting, according to that census, of one hundred and sixty-seven families, including hers. In keeping with the dual identity of the Shore, she grew up on a farm and could drive a tractor before she drove a car, but she spent her childhood picking crabs and begging uncles and family friends to take her fishing. She also spent her childhood working alongside her parents—sorting scrap, stacking firewood, helping empty the trash and vacuum the carpets when they cleaned the bank. On her own time she attended 4-H in the evening and vacation bible school in the summer and was shocked, once she left home, to learn that New York City was only four hours away. In short, for all intents and purposes, C. was from the working-class small-town South, while I was from the moneyed Midwest—the heartland not of farmers and autoworkers but of oil magnates and railroad barons—which is the contrast that was on my mind when all of a sudden in the middle of Pennsylvania the tire went flat.
All of falling in love is a kind of hiatus, a pause in the normal order of things. Workaholics in love start knocking off at five, early birds in love linger in bed until noon, cynics in love turn their starry eyes upon the world and declare it beautiful. But that morning by the highway was something else, a kind of pause within the pause—a little lacuna, of a piece with our first lunch, into which we slipped while time looked discreetly away. There was nothing in the world to do but sit there beside each other and wait. We were not in a pretty place. I imagine, although memory does not supply it, that there must have been trash along the shoulder of the road and the smell of diesel fuel in the air and the intermittent hot windy rush of a tractor-trailer in the near lane. But all of that, if it existed, didn’t matter. What mattered is that, somehow, as we sat there talking, my sense of looming exposure began to diminish, and the conviction deepened within me that I had found someone who, if I could stay by her side, would make life better no matter what was happening to me or to us or to the world.