Road to Paradise. Paullina Simons

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      I was going eighty on a local road, through fields with mountains up ahead, past abandoned gas stations.

      “What’s wrong with you?” Gina asked.

      “Nothing.”

      “Why are you driving like a maniac?”

      Silence again.

      “We did the right thing, didn’t we?” I asked.

      “About what? Can you stop for a sec and check the map? I don’t see the turnpike signs anywhere.”

      We did see another billboard, this one from the American Board of Proctology: GIVING SOMEONE THE FINGER DOESN’T HAVE TO BE A BAD THING.

      “I mean, that girl could’ve been trouble, right?” I said.

      “Oh, her. Why are you still talking about her?”

      We turned up the music. Diana Ross plaintively wanted to know if we knew where we were going to. Gina plaintively wanted to know when she was going to be fed. Having lost my sense of how far we’d come, whether we even were still in Maryland, I made a series of rights and lefts hoping the zigzag would eventually lead me to the toll road that transsected the entire state of Pennsylvania, as per Rand-McNally road atlas. Past a meandering town of antique stores and law firms we drove, past a deserted little town with not even a sandwich place for us to hang our hats, and, still hungry, we left the churches and the placards behind, the girl, too, and drove through the Appalachian Trail, sunlit and hazy, covered with a silken green and gold canopy. I pointed out a street sign that said Applachian Road. “You’d think that since they live here, they’d know how to spell it.” We chuckled at that, and then again at a sign that stated without punctuation: SHARP CURVES PEDESTRIANS 4 MILES.

      For four miles we looked for these pedestrians with sharp curves. Liberty Street had long since become Appalachian Trail with the tall filtering trees looking almost yellow with their light green sparklings. After the trail was Hagerstown. The shops along the way seemed too dinky for us. Finally, our long-awaited toll road! With a shopping center and a Subway sandwich place.

      At the table I stared blankly at the open map. Gina wanted to know if Toledo was in Pennsylvania. I glared at her over my tuna sandwich. “Toledo is not in Pennsylvania. It’s in Ohio. Everybody knows that. God, Gina.” Why was I so suddenly annoyed?

      She shrugged, unperturbed, fixing her hair and applying lipgloss before eating.

      “Did you say you were going to school to become a teacher?” I asked disapprovingly. “How are you going to teach little kids if you don’t know something like that?”

      “The reason I don’t know it,” Gina said patiently, eating her Cheddar and Swiss on rye, “is because we weren’t taught it. And the reason my kids won’t know it, is because I won’t teach it.”

      “But isn’t this something we need to know? Where things are?” I pointed to the state of Pennsylvania. “Look. I want to show you.” For some reason Gina had unreasonably irritated me with her torpid unhelpfulness. I flipped open my spiral, started to write down how far we’d come. I estimated it to be barely sixty miles. And it was nearing three in the afternoon. How in the world was I going to drive another 420 miles to Toledo? When I said this to Gina, I could tell by her glazed-over eyes she thought it was a rhetorical question she had no intention of answering. Her attitude seemed to be: I sit in the passenger seat, you drive, you get me to Eddie. For my part, I sing, pretend to stare at a map, look out the window and give you a little bit of money.

      “Gina, you have to help me. I can’t СКАЧАТЬ