I wonder about Mom’s image of California, the fantasies that magnetized all those other kids Gwen knew. Did she picture sandy beaches and desert bluffs, long-haired men and suntanned women in beads, only to land in a flannel-and-jeans, barely there town remarkably like the isolated communities back home? Or was she open to anything that took her a continent away from Maine?
The route from Bridgton to Brownsville is a straight shot across the country, almost the longest line you could draw from one coast to the other. I look at images of restored 1966 Fairlanes, parked in clean deserts with mountains climbing into the sky behind them. It’s exactly what I would have chosen for that drive. That car really does look like freedom.
* * *
Tom found work easily; his father was a logger and a welder and had good contacts. He first worked as a roustabout, an odd-job man, in a huge log-processing mill in Marysville, a larger city about an hour away, down out of the hills.
Tom did a good job, worked hard, and was soon promoted to servicing trucks in the mill on the night shift. The promotion meant that he and Crystal had to move to the city of twelve thousand, and they had trouble adjusting. Tom hated the late hours, and the work was tougher and dirtier than he was used to; he hated smelling like oil and grease all the time. But Crystal studied for her GED at the local high school. The school made her an assistant teacher, and after she aced the eight-hour test, they invited her to teach full-time. Tom still glows with pride, talking about Crystal the teacher.
She was only seventeen when they offered her that job. But she didn’t accept. She and Tom had never gotten used to Marysville, where they lived in an apartment complex on the sad fringes of town, a place with a mossy pool in the center, full of drug dealers and child abuse. They soon moved back up into the hills, where life was simpler. Tom’s father got him a job as an auto mechanic, and they rented a trailer right behind the garage.
Crystal liked to tease Tom about his motorcycles, an endless series of fixer-uppers that he bought and sold and traded with other young men. One evening she sat on the porch attached to the trailer, surrounded by the warm orange air of a California dusk in September, watching Tom work on one of his bikes. Much of it was brown with rust and the soft dirt on which it was parked, but he knew what he was doing. Crystal thought he might actually finish this one, couldn’t wait to sit on the back of it, speeding down a curvy ocean highway, just like on TV. She thought about this while she sat quietly sipping her beer and watching Tom’s back muscles move under his T-shirt.
Finally he stepped back and threw the wrench on the ground next to his other tools. He smiled at her and brushed some dirt off his hands.
“Hey,” he said, giving her a little smile. “Watch this.”
He jogged a few yards away from the motorcycle, then took a running start. He planted his hands on the back of the seat, flipped himself over in the air, and landed, perfectly, astride the bike.
She didn’t know he could do that.
“Wait!” she yelled. “Wait right there! I’m getting the camera.”
He beamed at her, face smudged, legs splayed out. It was still plenty light out for a picture.
* * *
But that motorcycle, and all the others, stayed in the yard: Tom never got them in good enough shape to take her out for a ride. Often, he’d take the car and drive off alone, then get in a wreck on his way back, driving drunk on mountain roads. He went through one vehicle after another. And even when they had a working car, Crystal couldn’t go far on her own, because she didn’t have her license yet and she didn’t like breaking the law. It made her too nervous. There wasn’t really anywhere to go anyway, and soon she was bored and homesick. Sometimes she picked up shifts at the café connected to the garage, but there wasn’t any work around that stimulated her mind. “She went right up the wall,” as Tom puts it.
Eventually Tom got his hands on a classic Chevy Impala, a comfortable vehicle meant for long cruises. They scraped together a few dollars and drove back home to Maine—the California experiment had lasted about a year and a half. Of those California days Tom now says, “I was too wild—I wasn’t behaving myself at all! I’m positive she would’ve wanted to come back to Maine anyway. But it would’ve been better to come back, y’know, not as penniless as we left. She deserved better—I know that now, and I probably knew that then.”
I don’t doubt that he knew Mom deserved better. But I’m not sure she knew. Not yet.
* * *
When Tom and my mother returned to Maine, they rented one of Bridgton’s many run-down apartments. It was a place of tilted floors and leaky sinks, one of a dozen or so units in a flat-roofed, three-story building, a typical Maine affair with porches clinging to the green chipped-paint sides and crooked stairs and landings running over it like spiderwebs. Mom started work at Pleasant Mountain Moccasin, known as the Shoe Shop, one of Bridgton’s two major employers back then—the other was a textile factory called Malden Mills, known as the Mill. Mom worked at the Shoe Shop until her death: twelve years spent standing over a workbench pushing large needles through the stiff leather uppers of loafers, Docksides, and moccasins. She added the thick white topstitching around the toe, the rustic touch that made those shoes so charmingly casual, so magnetic to flatlanders who wore them sockless on vacation. But those stitches also held the shoe together; uniform stitches meant that it would be beautiful, would have a nice, even shape. It was a job requiring skill and precision and strength.
While Mom sped through each day at the Shop, Tom worked on cars and took on some construction jobs. He is a skilled mechanic and carpenter, good at the work but not good at keeping it. He’s counted on these sorts of jobs all his life—fixing broken-down cars, working house construction for a day or a week, hired through personal referrals and favors, friends and father figures. Back then, when he wasn’t working, he was at the Sulky Lounge, a tiny bar wedged into the main downtown strip, walking distance from their apartment.