She had packed thermoses of coffee for John and herself for the drive, and she was guzzling hers. John had tuned the radio to jazz. He was doing that annoying thing, humming along to a song even though he had no idea where the tune was going. Amy had long ago stopped telling him about the things he did that annoyed her. She’d known John since she was nine, and now she was forty-six; she knew every one of his habits and tics, as spouses in most marriages did, but the difference was that Amy had watched those tics grow as he did. Now the humming, which was once a boyish quirk, had developed into a full-blown grown man’s assertion of himself. It was his way of taking up space in the car.
As they wound along the highway, she noted the breadth of trees flanking both sides of the road. There were no towns or even buildings in sight. Just trees. How quickly they had found themselves in the country. She felt a hint of jealousy of Helen, of her daughter’s still-intact childhood. She still got to attend camp, got to escape every summer, got to be a girl.
As soon as Amy drained the last of her coffee, she realized how urgently she had to pee.
“Honey, can we pull over?”
“We’ll be there in half an hour,” John said, his eyes on the road.
“I can’t wait half an hour.”
“You can’t hold it?”
“No.”
John sighed. “You and your tiny bladder.” He did not say this affectionately. John had not learned to let go of trivial annoyances in the same way that Amy had. “I haven’t seen any signs yet for rest stops.”
Amy hadn’t either, and she waited patiently, with her thighs pressed against each other, until she saw a blue sign with the stick figure drawings of a man and a woman and the block letters EXIT 31 over it.
“Exit 31,” Amy said, pointing to the sign. “Five miles.”
“I see it,” John said.
In five miles, Amy made a conscious effort not to point out the sign again, and John remembered to take Exit 31, turning the wheel sharply around the tightly curving road.
They ended up at a stoplight and a T where their road met a perpendicular two-lane country road. There were no further signs for a rest stop.
“Turn right,” Amy said.
“How do you know?”
“I just have a feeling.”
John looked at her suspiciously. But he made the turn anyway.
They passed patches of thick woods, no people or homes in sight, followed by open expanses of farmland. Amy wasn’t sure whether they were in New York or Connecticut at this point.
“Where are we?” John said, as if hearing her thoughts. He leaned over the steering wheel and looked out at the road and at the next farm they passed, with its red barn and silver silo towering over it.
“Beats me,” she said.
They drove for a few more minutes, still not seeing a gas station or any sort of public restroom.
“Cows!” Amy exclaimed as they drove by dozens of them grazing. “I’ll take the brown ones; you take the ones with spots?”
He grunted. So he wasn’t in the mood today.
“Ame, let’s just pull over,” he said, already pulling onto the side of the road near a lush patch of trees and bushes.
“No,” she said, pushing her knees closer together. Her bladder pulsed.
“We are in the middle of bumfuck Connecticut and now at least ten minutes from the highway. No one is going to see you.”
“It’s embarrassing, John.” She sounded like a little girl to herself, the way she whined. Why didn’t he have to go? He’d had coffee too.
“Well,” he said, sitting back in his seat. This was his move, the lean back, which signified that he was reserving his right, as the breadwinner and patriarch of the family, to make the final decision. Once he did the lean back, that infuriatingly stubborn move—arms folded, satisfied scowl on his face—there was no bargaining with him.
Amy sighed and poked through her purse for a packet of tissues. She took one from the pack and made her way, with a frown, out of the passenger door and around the back of the car.
He had pulled alongside a rough patch, which dropped steeply from the road, and she stepped carefully down to a more secluded area, snapping twigs under her feet as she went. She found herself surrounded by overgrown bushes and the thick trunks of trees with lush summer coverings of green leaves overhead. She arrived at a clearing behind a wide-based tree, which would shield her from the view of anyone on the road, and, with the hand holding the tissue, lowered her underpants to below her knees and lifted the hem of her dress with the other.
She exhaled as the stream of urine gushed out of her, splattering on the dirt between her feet. She heard a car driving along the road above.
“Shit.” Her pee had started to make a puddle on the ground, and a few drops splattered back up her legs. As the stream began to slow, it trickled onto the inside of her thigh and down the length of her calf.
She wiped herself and tried to clean up the mess she’d made on her leg with the one tissue, wishing she had brought the pack with her.
She heard some sort of crunching in the leaves on the other side of the tree, and she had a mental glimpse of herself as someone else would see her: squatted, panties down, bare-assed. God dammit, John. She scrambled to right herself, pulling her underwear up and letting her dress down.
As she did so, she heard the crunching come closer, a light pattering along the floor of the grove.
“Hello?” she said. She was almost certain it was an animal, but what if it wasn’t? What if this was her last moment on earth; how would John explain it to everyone? To the kids? Even within her trepidation, she felt something akin to satisfaction that her disappearance would be John’s fault.
She approached the tree and peered around it to look in the direction of the pattering. The animal’s ears were sticking up, and its black eyes were open wide. The deer had stopped moving, startled by Amy. It was just a baby, though no mother was in sight. She was so used to deer digging through her vegetable garden and eating her lettuce that she knew them only as nuisances. This felt different. She felt a sympathy, an instinctual sadness for the fawn, worrying that it had been separated from its mother. But what would she do if it had?
The fawn was standing only a few feet away from her. Amy looked into its black eyes, wondering whether it was a boy or a girl. She took one small step forward, testing it, seeing if it would run away. It just stared back, unfazed. She thought it was supposed to be afraid of her.
She heard another scampering and then saw a larger deer approaching the fawn. The mother. Instantly the fawn turned and followed it, leaving Amy, who suddenly remembered that John was waiting in the car.
—
They arrived at camp half an hour later, as John had said they would. She probably could have held it.
They drove up the hill, past the stables, and to the parking lot below the flag lawn.
“Do you remember our first kiss under that tree?” she asked him as they parked, pointing to the elm tree on the lawn.