Wrong Highway Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  WRONG HIGHWAY

  “Wrong Highway spins a bored cliche—the disenchanted housewife—into a thrilling exploration of how to grasp meaning in the minutiae of family life. Struggling within the confines of suburbia and her family’s expectations, Wall Street wife and mother of four Erica Richards finds solace in a drug habit that makes the world seem bright and infinite. Set on Long Island in the technicolor 1980s, Wrong Highway is a gripping novel about family, self-hood, and what it takes to escape prisons of our own making.”

  —Rhianna Walton, new book buyer, Powell’s Books

  “Wrong Highway is a captivating debut novel about life in Long Island in the late ’80s. Beginning with early memories of Erica and her sister Debbie at the 1964 World’s Fair, the path weaves through their dysfunctional jaunt as adults and parents. At times comedic and others tragic, Erica’s trip is always entertaining.”

  —Kim Bissell, co-owner, Broadway Books

  “Wrong Highway is by turns funny, sad, quirky, and surprising, but always engaging. It’s Erica’s story and she tells it at dazzling speed, with vibrant language, and with high (pun intended) energy and insight. It’s a story that captures a full spectrum of family dynamics many of us have experienced, yet viewed through a unique lens that questions the meaning of it all, even if it looks from the outside that you have it all. Babies, children, sisters, parents, in-laws, nephews, a loving but largely absent husband, Erica shares it all with brutal and amusing honesty. Her coping mechanism may be a little unorthodox, but her struggles reflect. . . an important and transformative American decade. A riveting and entertaining read.”

  —Nancy Johnson, arts and nonprofits consultant

  Shepherdess Books PORTLAND

  WENDY GORDON

  WRONG HIGHWAY

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 Wendy Gordon

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, contact the publisher at the address below.

  Shepherdess Books

  [email protected]

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Printing, 2016

  ISBN (print) 978-0-9970780-0-8

  ISBN (eBook) 978-0-9970780-1-5

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015919710

  Frontispiece photograph © Superstock

  Credits are found at the end of the book.

  Copyediting by Kristin Thiel

  Book design by K. M. Weber, www.ilibribookdesign.com

  To my husband Zak and my children

  Gabrielle, Jessica, Alex, and Lukas

  You are the center of my life.

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CREDITS

  BOOK CLUB DISCUSSION GUIDE

  PROLOGUE

  MAY 1964

  In the future, moving sidewalks will propel you forward without effort, but in the present, you only twirl in circles. Your mother is searching frantically for her wallet, which turns up in her coat pocket. Your father is scrutinizing the fair map so carefully you’d think it contains directions to buried treasure. Your sister is sucking her finger and pouting.

  “Oh my.” Your mother sighs. “I hope this wasn’t a mistake.”

  “I have to go to the bathroom, Mom,” your sister whines, pointing to a line so long it curls around the side of a neighboring pavilion.

  “I don’t,” you protest. “Do you, Mommy?”

  “No, but it doesn’t do any harm to try,” your mother says.

  You get in line.

  Even though the New York World’s Fair is less than twenty miles from your home in West Meadow, it took a month of nagging your parents to even get in the gate. Your mother dislikes crowds, and weekends are always busy, with your father’s chamber music group, his model train group, the never-ending housework and yard work, and your sister’s ballet lessons. Finally, they offered you this day as an early birthday present: next week you turn nine years old.

  Given your family’s inevitable slow start plus horrible traffic, you didn’t arrive until nearly noon. Now you are standing in an endless line for the ladies’ room. When you finally get in there, your mother insists you try and pee even though you’ve already told her you don’t have to go. A little trickle comes out. You wash your hands and dry them under the blow dryer. Your mother reapplies her lipstick. Your sister smooths her hair.

  When you emerge, your father waves you over to an even longer line, this one for hamburgers.

  “Best to fuel up before sightseeing,” he says.

  “I’m not hungry,” you protest.

  You eat the burger anyway, along with a bag of fries and a strawberry shake, sitting at a plastic table under an umbrella. After everyone dumps the paper garbage in the trash, your father announces you are going to the Canadian pavilion.

  “Can’t we go someplace else?” you ask.

  “The pamphlet says they have an excellent selection of Eskimo artwork,” he says.

  You trod through a display of masks, harpoons, ivory carvings, and a reasonably interesting igloo you can climb into. Dad tells you more than you ever wanted to know about Inuits and the Bering Strait.

  When you emerge into the April air, bugs whiz about, despite your mother’s best attempts to bat them away.

  “I have twenty-two mosquito bites, Rikki,” your sister says, lifting up her skirt to display a particularly gross one on her upper thigh.

  “Don’t call me Rikki,” you say. “My name is Erica.”

  Your sister ignores you, moving your hand to the bite’s pustular white center. “Scratch it—it
itches,” she commands.

  The pimple actually intrigues you, in a perverse sort of way, so you press down, and blood and goo shoot out.

  “Ooh, yuck!” your sister squeals, turning and dashing blindly ahead. You chase after her, head down like a bull, colliding with a group of middle-aged men speaking a foreign language.

  “Watch where you’re going, Rikki!” your father shouts. “Slow down!”

  You lift up your head, slightly dizzy. The paths ahead of you twirl, bend, and stretch to the horizon. With all the glass and domes it looks like the kind of world you’d encounter when you stepped out of a time machine into the future.

  Your family regathers, leaning against the glass rail of the prototype moving sidewalk.

  “Are you feeling all right, Debbie?” your mother asks.

  “I think I’m getting a stomachache,” your sister says, clutching her belly.

  “She ate too many french fries,” you say. “Debbie is a pig.”

  “Be nicer to your sister,” your father says. “You know she has a sensitive stomach.”

  “Maybe we should leave soon,” your mother suggests, scratching her neck. She always scratches her neck when she gets nervous, which is often. You roll your eyes in exasperation, which only fuels her nervousness.

  “There’s school tomorrow, and homework, and if Debbie’s not feeling well. . .” Your mother casts her head around, as if searching for other excuses to leave.

  “Maybe we should vote on one more pavilion to see and then go,” Dad says, readjusting his glasses.

  “My vote is for the African pavilion,” he continues. “They have some fascinating wooden sculptures. Religious icons and so forth. I read about it in National Geographic.”

  “I want to go to the Seven-Up pavilion,” you say.

  “What do they have there?” your father asks.

  “I don’t know.” Your guess is unlimited soda, but you know that to voice that hope is to doom your chances. You let go of the rail and cruise along the moving sidewalk. Rubber slides under your feet. You are skating into the future.

  “Can we get off this moving sidewalk?” your Mom asks. “I feel like I’m going to fall down.”

  You step off the end and stand in a patch of grass near a building people enter through the mouth of a gargantuan mahogany head. Your long anticipated day, your alleged birthday present, feels like it is ending before it has barely begun.

  “Can I look around by myself?” you plead.

  “Are you crazy?” your mom blurts, scratching her neck. “You’re not even nine years old. You’ll get lost. Remember Tanglewood? Remember Jones Beach? We nearly killed ourselves looking for you!”

  Indeed, you remember both Tanglewood and Jones Beach, where, after a dizzying run marred by only a slight knot of fear, you’d been apprehended by security personnel, brought to the Lost Children’s booth, offered candy, and returned to the sweaty, anxious arms of your parents. Both times, you’d been driven away by an attack of claustrophobia. The bodily smells and gestures of your family closed in on you, suffocating you with a heavy closeness, like garlic breath. You felt like throwing up. The blanket-dotted sand, the oily waves, the stands of trees, the grown-up strangers drinking wine—anywhere and everywhere seemed fresher, cleaner, and freer.

  “I want to go to the Seven-Up pavilion too,” says your sister, her stomachache evidently forgotten.

  Inspiration strikes.

  “We could go together. Me and Debbie.” You look to your sister for support, and surprisingly, she flashes you a conspiratorial grin. “She’s twelve. She’s almost a teenager. We could go to the Seven-Up pavilion together.”

  “Well, all right,” your father says, despite the fact your mother is vigorously shaking her head and scratching her neck again. “That way your mother and I can explore the African pavilion and maybe Latin American too. Meet us at the Scandinavian pavilion, the one by the exit, at eight. That’s three hours from now. Debbie, I’m trusting you to be in charge.” He lends your sister his special watch, the one with the fourteen-karat gold band.

  “Shouldn’t you give them the map?” Your mother sighs.

  “Oh yes,” your father says and hands over his precious pamphlet.

  Your sister carefully folds it into her purse.

  You and your sister check the map to find your way to the Seven-Up pavilion, where you both hold cups underneath a series of wall spigots, sampling the flavors of soda, some familiar, some not, that gush forth. “Are you sure it’s okay to drink all this?” your sister asks, as she guzzles down cup after cup. On a table in the center of the pavilion, chocolate chip cookies are piled high on platters, free for the taking. Giggling, on a sugar high, you run into the Bell telephone pavilion where you make faces at each other over videophones.

  “Hey, Debbie,” you say, forming antennae with your fingers: “I’m an alien from Jupiter. We love girls with blue eye shadow and white lipstick. Want to go on a date?”

  “Why, sure, Jupiter boy,” she answers. “You’re just my type.”

  You ride in little boats along a man-made stream while mechanical puppets in costumes from many countries sing to you about what a small world it is. The boat ride is reasonably entertaining, but otherwise you skip any pavilions featuring fascinating ethnic customs or handicrafts, sticking with glass and metal, with the new machines that promise to make your future so effortless and wonderful. You run from exhibit to exhibit, breathlessly discovering new uses for electricity and coal and nuclear power.

  In the Sperry Univac pavilion, a computer occupies half a large room, humming loudly and emitting heat. You enter a series of numbers, and it spits out a recipe for oatmeal cookies, which your sister folds and puts in her purse. One side of the computer flashes a shimmery blue-and-white tic-tac-toe board; visitors are encouraged to play, and the computer wins every time.

  Your sister stamps her feet in frustration. She has a mind for games and inevitably beats everyone at anything from Go Fish to Monopoly. But she cannot defeat this computer. The best she can do is take it to a draw. She keeps playing, hissing at the expressionless screen, oblivious to the impatient line forming behind her, until she finally remembers the other thing she’s been oblivious to: your father’s watch ticking inexorably toward the hour your freedom ends. She frowns.

  “Rikki, we should head back now,” she says. “It’s ten minutes to eight.”

  It can’t be! “A few more minutes,” you plead.

  Your sister extracts the map from her purse, consults it. “It’ll take at least ten minutes to walk back,” she says, finally giving up her post at the computer. A fat kid with a crew cut, his striped shirt straining at the buttons, takes her place. Your sister reaches for your hand, but you twist away from her grasp.

  You leap out of the Sperry Univac pavilion into the late spring air. The sky is slowly darkening, and lights are blinking on like stars. You are tall for your age, with long legs and knobby knees. You can outrun your petite sister, with her soft dimpled thighs. The path swirls ahead of you. You like being free of the map, having no idea of your direction. You turn right and left at random. Around a bend you glimpse a fountain, water streaming down gray rock, shooting glitter into the air. It reminds you of Jones Beach, the way the waves curl and crash. That day at Jones Beach when you ran away, your mother and sister had sat rooted to the blanket, reapplying sunscreen and complaining about the heat. You jumped up and ran into the waves, letting the water lift you up and carry you, becoming one with a mob of ecstatic bobbing heads.

  Your sister huffs at your heels, pleading. “Rikki, c’mon, I’ll get in trouble. Mommy and Daddy will worry. They’ll never trust us again. It’s getting dark.”

  You balance on the concrete ridge bordering the fountain. A series of flat stones leads to the center, where water tumbles down in a silvery rush.

  “Rikki, if you don’t stop, I won�
��t let you listen to my albums.”

  You hesitate. When your sister is in the right mood, she admits you into the pink sanctuary of her room where she plays the albums she buys with her babysitting money: the Beatles, Herman’s Hermits, Paul Revere and the Raiders. These records bear no relationship to the dull sonatas Daddy plays in his chamber music group or the show tunes Mommy listens to on the radio. When you listen to your sister’s records, the dancing starts deep inside your bones and vibrates out your skin.

  But even her music is recorded and abstract. The rhythms of this night, with its warm breeze and promises of summer to come, are immediate. You are carried along by the spanking-new pavilions, the barely trod paths, the endless parade of people, the underlying buzz of footsteps and conversation, the humid stink of sweat and hot dogs, the lavish orange sunset.

  A nearby pavilion lights up in blue and red. In the fountain, the water reflects the light like colored cellophane. Hopping from the first stone to the second, you spy a sparkle of copper and silver, reach down into the water, and grab a handful of coins. The dirty water splashes up, making a wet stain on your shorts.

  “Rikki, that’s not your money. And you look like you wet your pants. We have to go. Now.” Your sister pants at the edge of the fountain, her freckled face wrinkling in exasperation.

  You stuff the coins in your pocket and reach into the water for more coins, flashing a dripping handful at your sister.

  “There’s tons of money in here!” you shout.

  Another pavilion blinks on in bright yellow, turning the stones golden. You follow the golden path to the heart of the waterfall. The water soaks your hair, your clothes, pours into your sneakers. The coins lie heavy in your pocket. You shiver deliciously.

  “We don’t have to go home!” you cry through mouthfuls of water. “We can live at the fair! We can buy our own food! All the soda you want! Cookies! Hamburgers too, and pizza, and french fries!”

  “Rikki, we’re going to be so in trouble.” Your sister totters on those heeled sandals she insists on wearing everywhere.

  “We won’t have to go to school!” You wave your arms in the air.