Road to Paradise. Paullina Simons

station? My insides filled with liquid nitrogen. No way! No rides to weaving strangers driving black trucks.

      The passenger door flung open. There was shouting, and suddenly a girl was propelled from the truck onto the grassy edge. She didn’t hop out, she fell yelling, “You bastard! Hey, give me my stuff!” A hobo bag flew through the air, landing heavily on the grass. A man’s hand reached for the door, pulled it violently shut and the truck peeled away, leaving smoking tire tracks on the pavement, black fumes piping furiously out of the stacks. He drove fast now, and straight.

      “Asshole!” the girl yelled after him, getting up, dusting herself off. She didn’t seem to be hurt, though I was trying not to look too closely. I put the ’Stang in gear and accelerated, not like the truck—in anger—but in fear. The girl stood, picked up her bag, turned to us, smiled, and stuck out her hitching thumb. She waved with the other hand. She was young, heavily made up, wearing not summer-in-the city shorts, but a white mini-skirt, a small electric-blue halter and lots of flashy costume jewelry. We passed her slowly, pretending like we didn’t even notice her, la-dee-dah. I whispered, “Gina, roll up your window.”

      “Why are you whispering?” But before she could turn the crank, the girl called out. “Hey, come on, be Good Samaritans, help a sister in need, will ya? Give me a ride.”

      Gina shook her head, I stared straight ahead without acknowledging her, and as we passed, the girl’s hitching thumb morphed into the middle finger to our departing yellow Mustang. “Thank you!” she yelled. I stepped on it, catching her in the rearview mirror walking uphill in high-heeled wedge sandals and her spicy blue halter.

      “Who wears sandals like that?” I asked.

      “Who wears a skirt like that?”

      We drove in silence.

      “We couldn’t pick her up,” I said.

      “Of course we couldn’t.” Gina glanced at me askance. “What are you even talking about? We made a deal.”

      “That’s what I’m saying.”

      “Shelby, did you want to pick her up?”

      “Slightly less than I want to be scalped,” I returned. The ridiculous part was I now had to stop and look at a map to see where we needed to turn to get on Penn Pike, but I couldn’t stop. I was afraid the girl might pursue me and force me to explain how I promised I wouldn’t pick up hitchhikers, not even a girl my age shoved roughly out of a black truck by angry hands.

      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 do this on my own. I’m going to get lost.”

      “Why would you get lost?” She sounded frankly puzzled. “You just looked at the map.”

      “Yes, but so did you!”

      “Yes, but I’m not driving.”

      “What does that have to do with anything?”

      “Look, I’m hopeless at maps. It’s just how it is.”

      “I’m not very good either,” I retorted, “but I still have to look, still have to figure things out.”

      “So figure it out.”

      I crumpled up the map like a soiled tissue. I didn’t finish my sandwich. “Ready?” I jumped up and left the table without even glancing back to see if she was coming.

      Was it ridiculous for me to be this ticked off? We were not yet in Pennsylvania, the state next to New York! My original plan had been to cross the George Washington Bridge at ten a.m., drive on I-80 for two hours and be in Pennsylvania for lunch by noon. So how was it more than a week later and we still weren’t there?

      I had lots of reasons to be simmering. It wasn’t the geographical ignorance that was irking me; after all, I was no Henry Stanley myself. What was getting to me was the supreme geographical indifference. Not just, I don’t know where I’m going, but I don’t care.

      In the parking lot, the sunshine beating down, stomach half-full, the Interstate up ahead, things bubbled up and spilled over. Molly, Aunt Flo, too long in Glen Burnie, the prickly sadness about lost closeness.

      “Look,” I said, whirling to Gina on the sidewalk. “This was a really bad idea. You clearly don’t want to be here, don’t want to do this. I don’t