Traveling Light

By Jeff Tompkins

"Traveling Light" tells the dramatic story of a young woman whose carefully planned future is up-ended by her impulse-buy of a used Honda Civic. Casey Hansmeyer is a recent graduate of Brown University who discovers, within days of buying her car, the dubious allure of I-95, that non-celebrated, non-wonder of an interstate highway which she can easily access from her home in Providence. Thoughts of grad school start to fade once Casey begins going for longer and longer drives on the highway, seduced by the thrill of going nowhere in particular, but fast.

At a rest stop in New Jersey one day, she meets Roxana, a woman her own age who bestrides the rest-stop food courts and gas stations of the Mid-Atlantic States with a sort of piratical swagger. Roxana tells Casey she’s taking a driveaway up to New Haven — and challenges her to an impromptu dare. Despite their obvious differences, Casey senses a potential kindred spirit in Roxana, and accepts the challenge.

The two women then develop a wary friendship, with Casey drawn in by her new friend’s charisma and verve but also disconcerted by the blatant lies she knows Roxana to be telling. Finally, when Roxana makes it clear just what she’s doing on the road, Casey is forced to make a decision that will have unpredictable consequences.

Literary fiction with the pacing and suspense of a thriller, "Traveling Light" features two highly original women protagonists and a specific milieu that readers don’t often encounter in contemporary fiction — the unique American subculture that is I-95, captured here in all its tawdry glory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jeff Tompkins
• Release date: Jan 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311473639

Jeff Tompkins

Jeff Tompkins was born in Hartford, CT and graduated from Brown University with a B.A. in Literature and Society. Today he is a writer and comics artist living in New York City. The author of two novels — "The Night Friends" (2012) and "Traveling Light" (2015) — he also writes for The Brooklyn Rail, among other outlets.

Book preview

PART ONE

NINETY-FIVE

ONE

On a brilliant Wednesday afternoon in mid-September, at the lower end of the New Jersey Turnpike, a few miles above the Delaware River, she hits it. She's just exited the Clara Barton Service Area and has no sooner merged with the main traffic—still, for Casey, a nerve-racking endeavor in its own right—when looking ahead she realizes that the bus a couple of hundred yards in front of her has apparently stalled and she's going to have to perform an evasive maneuver. In less time than it takes to work out in her head, Casey accomplishes three steps: she glances in both mirrors, she bears down on the accelerator, and then swings into the middle lane so smoothly that to someone watching it might look as though she'd intentionally piloted the Civic in a single gliding motion all the way from the service area's exit road right to that very spot. And no one honks. That's the main thing: not one yahoo in any of the three lanes behind her is so full of impacted rage that he has to vent his disapproval by blaring his horn at the woman in the blue Honda Civic, and for a moment, just a moment, it seems possible Casey has the makings of an adequate driver in her.

Okay, okay, she tells herself a few minutes later, so maybe it wasn't that impressive. But when you're a recent graduate of Brown University who's hungry for experience (and not just on the road), who's been driving less than a month, and whose ability to navigate through mechanical reality, the vast world of things, barely extends past coin-operated washing machines and laptop computers, any little indication of competence comes as not only a boon to the ego but also as an encouraging suggestion that the course you've embarked upon isn't, in fact, one of suicidal recklessness. You can even be forgiven, you think, for presuming that there's actually a place for you out here in this great race.

(Driving for real, that is. Sure, she'd earned the license back in high school, practically claiming it as a birthright like any normal teenager but until this past month she was lucky if she got behind the wheel three times in a year, helping Mom out with the errands during summer vacation or ferrying a friend to the Providence train station at the end of the semester. And the bus had always been there to shuttle her back and forth between school and her hometown in eastern Connecticut. So for four years, all her real excursions were mental.)

But not anymore. Each one of these strikes down the highway etches a line of force between Casey and the larger world, and announces that this particular bookworm will no longer be content with a library carrel and a laptop. Here I am! Somewhere she had seen the word momentum defined as the dynamic by which the force a body exerts increases with its velocity and although Casey has trouble with nearly any kind of scientific concept she can't help feeling now that her own momentum increases exponentially every time she leaves another state line behind in the rear-view mirror. That first foray? Rhode Island. Days later, Connecticut. Within a week came the degraded Mordor-like wastes of northern New Jersey, followed by the Turnpike's sinister narcotic monotony, and her thinking all the while, in her giddiness, This can be mine, too. I can encompass everything.

Her fingers have a tendency to get stiff on the wheel—she has to remember to flex them from time to time. In front of her now a maroon Corolla flashes its brake lights, and on a barely conscious level Casey tells herself, Corolla—that's a Toyota. As someone who knows nothing about cars she still finds it remarkable how she can connect a maker to a model every time she sees a name on the back of the vehicle in front of her. Explorer? Ford. Caprice? Chevy. The years of saturation advertising must have done their work well, because other pieces of data that would presumably be more valuable to Casey, like the first-person conjugations of Spanish irregular verbs, or the entire plots of certain Victorian novels, haven't lodged in her brain with nearly the same tenacity. Sentra? Nissan.

In northern Maryland, still headed south, the Susquehanna River strikes her as more gorgeous every time she crosses it, a kind of reward for having endured the Turnpike's doldrums on the way down. And coming back over the same river, she is greeted with an almost ridiculously picturesque sight on the north bank, over to her left—two silos and a barn, like something one of the Wyeths would have painted, standing watch in a cleared patch of land above the river and the bridge. Every time she sees those buildings and that field Casey is half-incredulous, wondering how such a perfect slice of pastoral is still allowed to remain within hailing distance of this busy ruthless corridor. But those unlikely grace notes have a way of turning up down here. Another time—also northbound, somewhere on either side of the Delaware River—she looks over to her right and spots a Canadian goose and her flock of goslings waddling along on the grassy strip that borders the road, so close it's almost as if she could reach out and feel the young ones' fuzz caress her palm as she drives by.

The cranes in the port of Baltimore all look as though they're giving the Nazi salute. But elsewhere in Maryland come highway signs for bodies of water called runs, a term she's never encountered before and immediately takes to, while still other signs have the names of counties on them and even though she knows it's corny the rustic note appeals to something in Casey as well. That ends once she begins to approach DC: there's a surprisingly dull stretch before you reach the city proper, as though the infamous Beltway (which, she understands now with some embarrassment, really is an actual road) acts as a centripetal force that sucks any life out of the periphery. Somewhat disappointingly, all the iconic monuments appear to be off somewhere there to the right; since her only real-life experience with them came during a ghastly eight-grade trip when she was still too bratty to appreciate anything to do with American history, Casey thinks it would be cool now to be able to situate Honest Abe or the needle in relation to the highway or the river, but she's already across the Woodrow Wilson Bridge before she fully comprehends where she is on the map.

The further south she drives, the more yellow ribbon bumper stickers there are on all the cars around her, fleeting reminders of the war she's managed to keep at arm's length for several months now. Below DC the HOV lane starts to seem like an implicit rebuke to a driver like her, flying solo and without even a destination in mind. But maybe it's because she's so far from home that she begins to feel tentative; at any rate she hasn't gone very far south of the Potomac before deciding it's time to turn around and declare herself satisfied with this latest reconnaissance mission. She can't do it all, at least not this trip. There is an inconceivable amount of highway still to go, the rest of Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, and what looks on the map like an endless stretch of Florida before I-95 runs out of continent altogether, and however much the horizon line always beckons it's the ad hoc, improvisational nature of these forays in her new (old) Honda that makes them fun for her. She isn't ready to have to make plans, isn't ready to be responsible and call people just to tell them where she'll be at a particular point in time. (But think of it: all she has to do is keep the car pointed in one direction and she can end up in Miami, a day, a day and a half from now. Practically another hemisphere. Although Casey's excitement at the prospect wanes when she admits to herself she wouldn't know how to talk to any of those people down there, not the retirees, fashion models, Europeans, Cubans, any of the exotic Miami tribes she has half-formed notions of from movies and TV. And on top of that she wouldn't have the faintest idea of how to dress for the place anyway.)

Back in Delaware the highway becomes a free-for-all again, people changing lanes as though they spend the entire rest of their lives waiting to live out their racetrack fantasies in just this fashion, so many tail and brake lights blinking that Casey regularly fears she may become disoriented and ram straight into the guardrail. Here and elsewhere she surprises herself with the vehemence of the epithets she directs at thoughtless drivers: someone cuts in front of her without warning and the word asshole leaps into her mind with startling clarity. Cowboy doing ninety? Cocksucker. And again. Dickweed. Perhaps there is just a little of her, after all, in the bumper sticker she'd seen on one of these forays:

A WOMAN WITH A GUN

HAS MORE FUN

Momentum. Dynamic by which. There are almost nineteen hundred miles of this stretching from Maine to Florida and somewhere, Casey has no idea if it's spurious or not but somewhere she read that I-95 and the Great Wall of China are the only two manmade structures visible from space: which makes it fascinating to speculate that one day the highway will become what the Great Wall is today, a ruin, majestic in its way but also crumbling and fragmentary, an enigma to be pored over not only by scavengers but also by archaeologists desperate for clues to the nature of the people whose truest monument this is.

But future generations who want to know who we were in 2003 could do a lot worse, she thinks, than to start with the rest stops. Because it's only when you start getting familiar with the rest stops that you appreciate how much the highway is its own environment. The stop in Maryland is exactly like the one in New Jersey which is exactly like the one in Connecticut, give or take a few minute variations in layout and menu and the kinds of junk you can buy at the little store. The gas stations sell Tasty Kakes and chocolate-covered pretzels for twenty-five cents.

And yet. When it comes to food, if you're willing to venture off of 95 once in a while, culinary character does exist out there. Casey's favorite epiphany of salt and grease comes courtesy of a Greek diner just off Exit 39 in Milford, Connecticut, a palace of mirrored glass and chrome that looks like somebody's dream of the nineteen-fifties; Casey routinely jokes to herself that it represents the Platonic ideal of a roadside eatery, and in fact if you sit at the counter there's a big color print of the Parthenon right up on the wall. Parking herself on one of those stools for the first time she thinks, I really should have been a classics major, they all seemed less stuck up and I would have gotten to read all that dirty poetry. On that visit a clutch of punk rock kids in eyeliner and tattoos sit wedged into the nearest booth, all of them looking as skinny as neckties in their black T-shirts and stovepipe jeans, while on the other side of her are several old-timers who slick back whatever is left of their hair into a DA and have occasional tattoos of their own peeking out from under collars and shirt cuffs. Ex-Navy, is Casey's guess. The courtly man at the register always hands back her change with, Have a nice day for you, miss.

Outside of Milford is the Chinese restaurant named House of Tung, and wouldn't her little brother Alex think that was funny. She thinks it's funny. You know you're in Connecticut because a Led Zeppelin song is playing on the radio. But leaving the highway has its hazards too. In Baltimore she nearly becomes lost trying to get back onto I-95 from the city's center, and spends a quarter hour circling through a dead zone around Camden Yards and Psinet Stadium, around and around, with the same desolate blocks confronting her no matter which way she turns. Maybe the whole area fills up on game day, she thinks, and the rest of the time they're happy to let it stay exactly this kind of ghost town. Then, a break: a miniscule sign points her towards a ramp that feeds into 95-North, but any sensation of relief is checked when the ramp launches her onto an impossibly high arc of roadway, about as wide as a shoulder strap, that loops out over the city in seeming defiance of any laws of gravity. The resulting giddiness is uncomfortably reminiscent, for her, of the first ascent a roller coaster makes right before that first precipitous drop.

Nineteen hundred miles. Weeks from now, when she feels like an entirely different person, Casey will be reminded of that moment in Baltimore. North of the Merrimack River the highway will start to hug the shoreline more closely and as a different sky stretches out there on her right—wider and deeper, more changeable, more full of weather—for several miles she'll have an exciting sensation of skirting the abyss, with almost nothing to separate her from the Gulf of Maine and, further out than mortal eye can see, the Georges Bank, another of the names she thrills to during the late weather reports on the Providence news.

People can have their flat panel TV sets, she thinks, their liquid crystal displays, high-definition, plasma, whatever. For her the only widescreen that matters is precisely this windshield, her window onto a continually unfolding panorama whose shifts whether sudden or gradual are proving to be more hypnotic than she could ever have imagined back in her library carrel. To come over a rise, and see the Delaware Memorial Bridge soaring into the sky ahead of you: whose heart wouldn't lift at a prospect like that? Or, in a different register, to be shooting up the Connecticut coast after dark, with no responsibilities or obligations between you and home: the cities may be terminal all across southern Connecticut but at night when the clouds are low they shine with the most gorgeous muted glow.

Momentum. Those nighttime Connecticut drives get to the heart of the experience for Casey. Alone in the darkened car, purely reactive, fixating on the glossy red taillights in front of her for miles at a time, she exults in a curious feeling of impersonality. Self-consciousness has flown away like so much exhaust out of the tailpipe; all that's necessary is to listen to a quiet confident voice in her head when she commands, Accelerator, or, Left lane now. It's her own voice telling Casey what to do, goading her on—above and beyond the basic requirements of navigation, control of the wheel, attention to her surroundings—with a single unchanging imperative.

Drive, she says.

TWO

She hadn't always been like this. In fact the car, or more accurately the new person she became when she was driving it, was such a recent development that Casey couldn't even explain to her own satisfaction what was happening to her.

What she did know was that the Civic had brought an abrupt end to the period of stasis she'd been stuck in, these last three months (or maybe longer; much longer). Since graduating from Brown at the end of May, she'd spent virtually the entire summer holed up in a one-bedroom apartment on a side street off of Prospect, studying for the GREs, the idea being that within months she would apply for grad school, and a year from now be on her way to a master's or perhaps even a Ph.D. in English. In June and July she'd held a part-time clerical gig at a downtown law firm, not so much for the spending money as for something to do—twenty hours a week of filing documents and making photocopies at least got you out of the house—but aside from that it had just been her and her books, vocabulary exercises and multiple-choice questions the building blocks of her days.

(And all that effort, alas, in spite of an inconvenient but steadily mounting suspicion that nothing very interesting ever happened on college campuses. Her problem, which she could occasionally admit to herself now, was that the grad school plan had been conceived back in the first half of her senior year, before the thesis on Thomas Hardy, an increasingly remote time in her life when she was still capable, for instance, of writing sentences that began with the word indeed, and could hike the length of Benefit Street worrying about discourses. What was the phrase that kept coming up in all the graduation speeches? Critical thinking. By the end of Commencement weekend her father had even started kidding her about it, asking her if she remembered to practice critical thinking while she was doing her laundry, say, or making spaghetti. At the time she'd been half-abashed by Dad's teasing, but by halfway through the summer she was only too ready to laugh with him.)

The truth was that she had been spinning, spinning, spinning. As if simply waiting for something like the car to come along and barrel through routines, expectations, and survival strategies alike.

She'd had at least two of those strategies—her own means, however modest, of relieving the summer's monotony.

One of them, like it or not, had to have been her newfound fascination with the personal ads. Every Wednesday afternoon fat stacks of the local alternative newspaper, bundled like bales of hay, were unloaded all over the East Side, and every Wednesday evening Casey found herself heading out on some pretext or other and coming home with the latest issue under her arm. Then, late that night, from the safety of her living room, she would survey the configurations of human desire. The standard acronyms made their appearances week in and week out—typically SWFs, SJFs, SWMs, and DWMs seeking LTRs—but occasionally, around the time she reached the first TV/TS, in the real free-for-all section of the ads, she would have to stop and think: Wait, that's a what looking for a what? And while she always made sure to read the entire section straight through, it was the men and their needs who consistently gave the best entertainment value, everyone from Mr. Good Guy to Goddess Worshipper and further back, the kink artists with their more specialized vocabularies. Casey's own experience was far from vast, but this was a world away from the mating rituals she was familiar with; to her it was inconceivable, for instance, that any of the boys she'd known in high school and college would grow up to be this shameless, this brazen, this—there was no other word—cocksure.

But if you believed what you read, all the supposedly normal people had migrated online, which would mean it was just the die-hards and the fringe element who were still bothering with newspaper ads. Wasn't she committed to print, too? She had a bachelor's degree in English to prove it. And if she was living vicariously through the personals, where was the harm? As far back as June she had resigned herself to the idea that this summer was going to be a fallow period; second semester had disintegrated in a welter of recriminations and incestuous relationships and the last thing she needed in her life right now was anything even approaching that kind of melodrama. Most of the time she liked hiding out in her aerie—and even at her most extroverted she wasn't the type to be out trawling the bars downtown in search of new faces. In the meantime, Discreet Fun and Mistress Needed had their uses. A little titillation, nothing serious, to see her through a quiet stretch.

But her other diversion, the one she could look forward to more unreservedly, was the eleven o'clock news. Four or five nights a week she tuned in and it wasn't the murders, or the car wrecks, the drownings, the storms, or any of the other calamities they filled the first two-thirds of the broadcast with, that kept her coming back. She loved the weather report; in particular she loved the marine forecast. As though oblivious to their poetry the weatherman would rattle off a string of evocative names—Woods Hole, Newport, Block Island—and together with the times for high tide and low tide these would inspire in Casey a tantalizing sense of being out on the edge of something: a separate realm that started right there at India Point Park, the water's edge, and stretched all the way past the southern horizon. For those few minutes every night she could sit in Providence, at the top of the hill, at the top of the Bay, and imagine herself becoming a giant lighthouse eye, training its beam from Nantucket all the way down to Montauk Point. Was this how old ship captains used to keep themselves from going crazy, in retirement? As July tipped into August, and August finally expired on September's doorstep, it was definitely how one twenty-one-year-old kept her contrary impulses—not just boredom, but a growing sense that she wasn't living her life—in check.

You first see the car parked in a driveway on Williams Street, a model and make so generic that your mind only half-consciously registers what it's looking at under the general heading car before moving on to the next piece of information. The sign is what grabs your attention, a modest hand-lettered piece of cardboard propped against the inside of the windshield and stating 1998 and, below that, a phone number and a price so reasonable that you haven't moved on half a block before the thought comes to you: You could buy that. Really, you could. Between the grad school money and what you've earned this summer at the law firm, a sum like that would represent little more than a hiccup. Ah, but the maintenance, you tell yourself. The repairs. Even a neophyte like you knows enough to realize you'd most likely be dealing with the proverbial money pit there, or why else would it be selling for so cheap? Today is a Friday, the week before Labor Day.

When you turn around and give it a second look you see that the car is blue: a blue Honda Civic, and beyond that you know so little about automobiles that you can't identify a single feature that you would be able to describe to another person. (Okay, so it has four doors.) But even you can appreciate that the Japanese ones are supposed to be more reliable, something about mileage per gallon and the way they're built overall that means this wouldn't necessarily represent the height of folly. You hoard that thought now, turning it over, examining it from all sides as you head back towards your apartment; and the curious thing is that later that evening, when you're eating dinner or settling down for the eleven o'clock news, the mental picture of the Honda sitting in its driveway lingers with surprising tenacity in the back of your mind. When you wake up the next morning you won't remember it for a good several minutes, but then, brushing your teeth in front of the bathroom mirror, you'll be startled by the sense of excitement it evokes, a rush so headlong that the idea you'll be able to sit down at the kitchen table now, and concentrate on studying for some exam, suddenly seems laughable. (You look a little laughable yourself, staring wide-eyed at your reflection with the toothbrush handle jutting out at an angle and the first trickle of foam beginning to run down your chin.)

The means to change your life—really change it—within your grasp. The question is how many more of these opportunities you'll be content to let slip away under the guise of prudence, practicality, or plain old common sense.

The first step was to consult the experts, or in their absence, the nearest equivalent to one she could find. A guy, at any rate. Casey dialed home in the middle of Saturday afternoon, hoping that for once he would pick up and not one of their parents.

Hello? Luck was with her—a boy's voice, which removed the need for any dissembling.

Stop looking at that.

"I'm playing a game," he said, in the indignant tone that little brothers probably had to resort to, the world over, with their big sisters.

Suppressing a giggle she said, Hi Alex. Mom and Dad around?

Uh uh. They're over at the Robinsons'.

Good. Listen, I need your advice about something. And for now I want this to stay between us, all right?

What's up? Alex said, suddenly engaged, and Casey knew she had his attention; even now, with the two of them practically grown up, a hint of conspiratorial mode still brought out the old reflexes.

I'm thinking of buying a used car.

No shit, really? What is it.

It's a Honda Civic.

Silence from the other end of the line. Finally she heard him say, quietly, Oh.

Alex, what?

He sighed. A Honda Civic? It's a little boring.

"So? I'm boring. For a second she wondered if she hadn't revealed more than she intended, even to Alex, but just as quickly dispelled the idea from her head. Come on, it would be my first one."

Oh. Right. Well, I guess that makes sense, then. Alex was quiet for another moment before he said, Car like that shouldn't give you too many problems, actually. Either he was genuinely reconsidering, or he wanted to show some gallantry after his initial reaction.

So what do you think. Should I do it?

Well, how much does the owner want for it?

She told him the price.

Really, he said, sounding impressed for the first time. Not bad. You know what? I'm gonna say go for it. Only, make sure of one thing first.

What's that?

Find out how many miles it has on it. The sign didn't say, right?

Um, no, it didn't. Typical her, she would never have thought of that.

If it has more than a hundred thousand, save your money.

Oh. Right, of course.

"So, am I