Road to Paradise. Paullina Simons

the statistics for the most popular names in the last twenty years, Gina has appeared in the top fifty every year. Gina, when she heard this, said, “Groovy!” And flung back her hair. All the boys think Gina is Italian, but there’s not an ounce of Italian blood in her. She just has an ethnic name. I don’t know why this bothers me, except perhaps because every time we went to the amusement park or the beach and the boys would hear her name, their smile would get bigger and they’d drawl, “Ohhhh, you’re Eyetalian …” as if being Italian endowed her with some special gifts, gifts I clearly did not possess. You know what wasn’t lost on me? Their expressions. “Geeeeeena,” they’d call, and every time they did, my irritation quotient twisted up.

      I, on the other hand, can only wish I had an anachronistic or ethnic name. Instead mine is just androgynous. Mine isn’t a name, it’s a last name. I’m epicene. Not one thing, not the other.

      Whatever it is, you can be sure that not once, not a single time, not when high on Ferris wheels, or dancing in clubs or swimming in the Sound, has any boy ever drawled out my name, with their eyes widening. “Shelbeeeeeee …”

      Shelby. This is who I am. Here is my name. I am Shelby.

      Gina approached me again the following day. “Are you still thinking?”

      “It’s only been a day!”

      “Soon summer’ll be over.”

      “It’s barely June.”

      “I gotta know. I gotta know if I need to make other plans.”

      “Okay. I think you should make other plans.”

      “Come on, Sloane.”

      Sloane! “If you need to know now, my answer is no ’cause I haven’t thought about it.”

      “But we’re graduating in two weeks!”

      “I know when we’re graduating.”

      She lowered her voice. “I gotta make tracks. I gotta get to some place called Bakersfield. I just have to. Don’t ask, okay?”

      “Um—okay.” Like I’d ask.

      “I have to know soon,” she said, beseechingly. “Because if we’re going, we have to make a plan.”

      It was as if she had said a magic word. It was better than please. My whole face softened. “Plan?” I loved plans. I liked to think of myself as a planner.

      “Yes. I have to tell my boyfriend when I’m arriving.”

      Frowning, I stepped away from her. “That’s the sum total of your plan? Notifying other people?”

      She didn’t know what I meant, and frowned, too. I really had to get to my Urban Public Policy class. “What else is there?”

      I said nothing. What else was there?

      “What? Going cross country? Oh, please.” She waved her hand dismissively. “We get in the car. We go.”

      “What about gas?”

      “When we run out, we get some.”

      “I posit that when we run out, it will be too late.”

      “So we’ll get some before. Shel, I’m telling you, you’re overthinking this.”

      Ugh. I shook my head. Underthinking, clearly. “I’m not headed to Bakersfield.”

      Gina blinked at me. Her blue eyes were slightly too close together, and when she stared, it made her seem vacant and cross-eyed. Perhaps I was being less than totally kind since she was pretty, and all the boys thought so. She was no slouch in the looks department, looked after herself and wore tight jeans, there was just something slightly blank about her eyes when they stared.

      “I gotta go. Look, even if I agree to do this,” I said, pressing my books to my chest like palms to my breasts, “you’re going to have to take a bus to Bakersfield. I can drop you off in San Francisco, but then you’re on your own.”

      “You want me to take a bus?” Gina said as if I were asking her to eat pig slops.

      I moved to go. She caught up with me. “Listen,” she said. “Please say yes. I won’t be able to go without you.” She lowered her voice. “I really need to get to Bakersfield as soon as poss. And Mom won’t let me go unless I go with you.”

      “Your mother won’t let you go? What are you, five?”

      “That’s what mothers do, Shelby,” said Gina, pompously. “They care what happens to you.”

      God! What she didn’t say was, you’d know that, Shelby, if you had a mother.

2

       Emma

      I was raised in a souped-up boarding house near Mamaroneck, New York, a four-star boarding house, which is akin to saying a sirloin burger. It’s still a burger. Actually, the house I lived in was in Larchmont, next town over, but I enjoy saying Mamaroneck, because it has the word Mama in it, and I don’t like telling people I come from Larchmont, as it carries with it a superior tag I don’t much care for. You have to have a French accent to pronounce it properly. Larsh-MOH. People who don’t know won’t understand, but people who know raise their eyebrows and say, “Oh, Larchmont. Wow.” It is for them I say I live near Mamaroneck. Nobody ever raises their eyebrows at that. It’s suburban-sounding, not French-sounding, unpretentious, not posh—all the things you can’t say about Larchmont, a cosmopolitan, sophisticated, old-world European city in the middle of parochial, provincial suburban America. The streets are winding and canopied, the houses Tudor, compact and esoteric, with square rooms, hardwood floors and tiny kitchens, a town where the Christmas lights get strung up for December down Main Street and twinkle merrily in the snow. Many houses are for rent, and there is one particular furnished Tudor, off Bridge Street, on a cul-de-sac (even that’s French) where Emma and I live in three small rooms above the garage that stands on a driveway overhung by enormous trees that drip sap in the spring and fall, staining my running shoes. We live there for free, but the way washing machines and vacuum cleaners live for free. In exchange for our rooms, we maintain the house. Mostly Emma does this. I help out on the weekends.

      I live with Emma. Her last name is Blair. And mine is Sloane. These things I know.

      Now for all the things I don’t know. I don’t know who Emma is, why I live with her or who she is to me. When I was a child, I used to call her Aunt Emma, but then I grew up. Always, since then, she has been just Emma.

      I also know this. And I only found out because Gina’s friend, the ridiculous and bug-eyed Agnes Tuscadero, eavesdropped on her parents’ very private kitchen conversation late one night a few years ago. Apparently my father, Jed Sloane, while married to my mother, took up with a woman who they think was named Emma, who might or might not have been my mother’s sister/aunt/best friend. So the reason I don’t have a mother is because of Emma. My mother split, leaving me with Dad and his new mistress/lover/fling. Agnes’s parents gossiped and Agnes told Gina who told me that my mother left a letter saying, I know all you ever wanted was your smokes and your drinks and your whore. Well now you can have them. My life and everything in it was a complete waste of time. My mother wrote that, I presume, sometime before she left me.

      I don’t know where this letter is, and believe me, that’s not for the lack of looking. Every crevice of every drawer in our two rooms and a living room, I have scraped through, searching for it, wanting to see her handwriting, and her name. Haven’t