Rest Stop by Aimee Bender

I was 19 and driving up the five with my first boyfriend who had a thing for public sex. Not super public, not really about getting caught, but more just the outside lip of danger, of other people a little too close by, of something pressing against the perimeter. Recently, we'd wrapped ourselves in a blanket beneath the umbrella shade branches of a drooping fir tree near the coast in northern San Diego, and we had kissed and pushed into each other there, against the footsteps of strangers and the misty swirl of ocean breeze. Two things come to mind now, as I look back. One: I did not enjoy this sex outside, this sex with the tiny possibility of discovery; it did not in any way match my desires or my comfort level and the second part is maybe that was the point. It was distracting enough, figuring out these details, who was where, what was visible, who might see us, what was covered, that neither of us had to pay much attention to the other person at all. Plus, I was 19, and preoccupied with what the girls on TV were doing and if I was doing such things equally well. I had a friend at the time who told me that she practiced her moaning sounds in the car when she was driving, as a way to pass the time as she traveled the north-south freeways from San Diego up to L.A. I found it so depressing, when she told me that, her heaving and rolling her head back while speeding beneath green exit signs as the radio went on about scandals in the political parties, but somehow I did not find it depressing when, under the umbrella needles of the fir, with those footsteps clip-clopping past, I played a reel in my own head about how adventurous a girlfriend I surely was even though I barely remember anything physical and I could see my boyfriend actively checking off a list in his mind of places he'd done it, making both of us the kind of people who say they've been to Germany if they've had a layover at the Frankfurt airport.

On this day, we were heading up the five from San Diego, already halfway to San Francisco, having rolled over the mountain and crossed the grapevine. We ate our nutritious packed snacks and stopped for lunch at the In-and-Out Burger in Kettleman City, the only one at the time on the five and a worthy way to apportion hunger timing on the road. We'd been back in the car for over an hour, listening to a murder mystery book on tape, digesting, zipping past the miserable cows in Coalinga who lived in the stench of warm unfree bovine bodies, when we passed a rust-colored sign for a rest stop. Yes? Steve asked, pointing, and I nodded, sure. I did not have to pee, he did not have to pee, but maybe we both needed a little rest from having sat for so long. By that point, we were about an hour north of Harris Ranch, a palm tree oasis of wealth and poolside bathing that still reeked of cow shit--an on-the-spot lesson in the inability of money to do away fully with the existence of the G.I. tract--but the manure odor was mostly gone by this rest stop, and so what we saw and smelled were just exhaust fumes from cars of all sorts driving north and south in straight lines, in an age when spending money on gas was not something that needed much consideration or thought. Steve drove an old Dodge Caravan, a pure sky blue, and he had remodeled some of the ripped interior with a friend who did good work with seat repair. I'd tied a red scarf around my head, even though it wasn't a convertible, but I felt like an old-time movie star best-gal girlfriend as we held hands and he pulled past the rest stop sign to park in the small lot. We tumbled out of the car. Eighty-five degrees, in early June. Three p.m.

I had just finished my second year of college, and Steve was several years older, a graduate hanging out around town, unsure what he wanted to do, and we were going to San Francisco to try to mend our relationship, which had not been feeling very interesting to him for the past few months. Steve, who had been his high school class president, enjoyed giving persuasive speeches, and his latest was about geography and surprise, and how a relationship could not survive if located in the same city for too long. "To see the same buildings over and over, with the same person," he said, over a burrito dinner one night, "is a recipe for zombies." He waved a tortilla chip in the air. "To Frisco!" he declared. He was my first real boyfriend, and we'd been together for a year and a half at that point, and I believed everything he said. I nodded into my cup of beans. I had landed a job as a hostess at a fancy fish restaurant in La Jolla for the summer but it wouldn't start for two more weeks. To pass the first few days of June I'd subscribed to those flimsy poor-smelling newspaper-material magazines that are chock full of games and my roommate and I sat next to each other on our navy blue garage sale couch that smelled of old perfume, and together we did word searches and crostics for hours. It was a mini hell. A change was needed for all, so I waved 'bye to my roommate, who was still in her pajamas and had been stuck for hours on a logic puzzle about housing developments, as Steve and I cut up fruit snacks and packed our long-sleeved shirts and gassed up the car.

At the rest stop, I took off my scarf and drank a warm bottle of water and Steve used the restroom. I watched a family with two kids run around a tetherball court that had no tetherball. The kids were twins, about three years old, two girls, with brown-reddish hair, and little scatterings of freckles. They screamed with delight, making circles.

Steve came back and grabbed my hand, and we toured the rest stop together. Bathroom hut, half tetherball court, three picnic benches, the rest stop sign, two garbage cans. In the car, we'd reached the halfway point in the book on tape and I suspected I'd figured out the murderer. Steve had also kept us both very entertained on the drive with license plate challenges, and he had won by finding Alaska somehow, on a motorcycle that I had barely seen. We threw out some of our trash, and walked around, and past, near where the rest stop sign itself blocked out a square of shade, making a small partition between the actual rest stop and the remaining hillside, which was just a faint little hump of earth, brown and sprawling, dotted with yellow weeds and a few smooth gray rocks.

"Come sit," Steve said, beckoning to me.

The twin girls circled the tetherball court, still shrieking. Their parents, with haggard under-eyes, stopped running and leaned against the hut that housed the restrooms, sipping from straws poked into deep tubs of soda.

This was the late nineties, and "Eyes Wide Shut" had just come out a few weeks earlier, and I had gone to see it at an old movie house in Hillhurst, with Steve. He'd loved it. He'd wanted to have copy sex that exact night, just like they did in the movie, with masks. I'd obliged. I held a cats-eye half mask up to my face, bought in the sale bin at the local drugstore, and I tried to remember how they did it in the movie. Cat girls, who gawked at the camera. Steve put on some kind of electronic music and growled at me. The truth was, I had not found the movie sex very exciting, and had been berating myself for my lack of adventuresomeness, and we struggled through that night, making it through after a couple hours and finally falling asleep without brushing any teeth, the mask in a twist on the floor. Later that week, on my own time, I took to reading movie reviews in a kind of sudden frenzy of critical interest. It took the reviewers a little time to find their way into the film. Some hated it: a travesty, they said. Kubrick's worst, they said. Others were intrigued. Initially some found it hot, and then somewhere in the second week of release it seemed like the consensus started to pick up in the opposite direction and someone stated clearly how it was not a very sexy movie, a movie all about sex that was absolutely unerotic and with that it seemed to click into place. At least for me. I read those reviews ravenously, like I was catching a glimpse of something, maybe the way Steve caught that Alaska license plate glint as the motorcycle rushed by. Even the casting of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman made more sense, then, since there they were, a famously attractive couple who did not seem physically connected, in a movie with a bunch of naked people having sex that did not turn on a lot of its audience. I felt so deeply relieved, reading those reviews, the same way I felt relieved years later to realize having sex behind a rest stop sign doesn't suit everyone. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Back to the walk.

Steve had sat himself down on the hillside of the rest stop sign, and he leaned his back against the wood. Pulled me into his lap.

"If you straddle me," he whispered, "we can be really discreet."

No one could see us--just our feet, maybe. No cars on the highway could see behind the sign, and the girls and the tetherball were maybe 15 feet away but it wasn't a pull, to go peek behind the rest stop sign. They were busily occupied with circles of their own. I was wearing a flow skirt, a long kelly green fake silk piece of fabric from a store that sold incense that I'd picked out for driving comfort, and it was the easiest thing to just sit in his lap and unzip his pants and check off the act of having sex at a rest stop on a road trip to San Francisco where soon we would be discovering that even the glory of fresh blue sea glimpses from Nob Hill could not rescue a relationship that had passed its saving point many months before.

The sun beat down on us. A lizard ran across the rocks, bolt fast. Cars whooshed by. It was the most perfunctory sex I'd ever had, even with my adrenalin charged, with my heart pounding at the fact that at any moment, if things turned, one little curious three-year-old twin freckly girl still might decide to run over to the hillside. Steve had his eyes closed, breathing thickly. He was in a popular local band, the lead singer. He sometimes threw himself into the audience, and was carried by the hands of his fans, who adored him, because of the one song he'd written that was impossible to forget; it etched a pattern through the ear and mind in seconds. As soon as he sang that song, all the audience felt as though he were the one they lived with, in their heads, all day long, and it was frankly kind of true. He'd written the song after his last breakup, in a swoop. He wrote it in five minutes, he confessed to me, one night, in the darkness, in his bed, as if he were ashamed. His other songs were nice enough but didn't stick. The ones he slaved over were annoying.

I had a hand pressed on the rest stop sign, to brace myself, preoccupied with splinters, and getting found, and if three-year-old minor memories could scar; at one point, Steve opened his eyes, and I closed mine in a teeter-totter effect, and tried to look as into it as I could.

He finished, we kissed, I picked myself up off him, we stood. Brushed off my knees, dusted with dirt. He brushed at his jeans. The sign was about five feet tall, so he stood a foot above, I about half a foot, and we stared at the girls, now sitting and quietly eating peanut butter sandwiches at the foot of the tetherball pole.

"Cute kids," Steve said, zipping.

He pulled me close. Kissed my cheek. "Do you want me to go down on you?" he said.

"Here?" I said.

He shrugged. "Sure. I'm up for it," he said. "I feel great."

"No," I said. "Can't concentrate here."

He shook a finger at me, friendly.

"You're not supposed to concentrate," he said.

I mumbled something about sunburn, and went to the bathroom. There was no door, just an open wooden L-shaped entryway, and it was cool inside, with no mirrors above the sinks, and a push faucet that sprayed for 10 seconds that I pressed seven times. The soap came out of the dispenser in a pink dribble, and I dried my hands on the starchy brown paper towel, and added it to the many crumpled dried hand towels in the trash can, left by the many various women heading north. Every crushed brown towel was a marker connected to a former woman's hands, a woman who had needed a rest and had come to the rest stop and washed and dried her hands, and who had stood at the sink without a mirror to look into, and now all those women were north of me, somewhere above. I could feel that they knew things I did not. If, at that time, anyone had asked me point blank what I found exciting, I would have stood for an hour, fumbling, empty faced. I had to be everything, then, if I didn't know. That there were women who did know what they liked I didn't doubt, whose paper towels were right there mixed with mine; I was far younger and smaller, standing there, but instead of feeling so sorely left behind, as I usually did, that we all had stopped at the same rest stop on this one day seemed consoling, like we all needed to clean our hands, and we all had soaked up the coolness of the dark wooden walls, and we all, for a second, were separate from the car that had brought us here, and if I just took my time, maybe I too could get further up the road someday, and would not be how I was now, my cheeks still burning with the shame of performance and pretending.

When I emerged, Steve was back in the car, arranging a cut apricot at his right hand for easy food reach.

"That was so great," he said, kissing me. "That was so fun!"

"I know," I said. "A rest stop!"

He tucked a hair behind my ear, and kissed the mole above my right eyebrow. "You're the best girlfriend in the world," he said.

I flushed, pleased. Even though the words felt like paper cutouts, I still enjoyed placing them on the carpet in my mind, and looking at them closely, like how I used to enjoy dressing paper dolls.

"152 through Gilroy?" he suggested, tracking the map.

I told him that sounded good, as I settled into my passenger seat. Kicked off my shoes, readjusted the leaning angle. As I rearranged my skirt around my knees, one of the twins ran up to the car, a tiny little girl.

She stood at my window, beaming.

"Hi," I said. "We were just doing some exercise. Over there."

For a toy, she was holding the top half of a tennis racket, the oval part that had somehow been severed from its handle, and she peered at me through it.

"Hello in there!" I said, and she laughed, her freckles little dots inside the squares of the racket weave.

"Bye bye," she said.

I waved good-bye, and she backed away, pressing the tennis racket close so her skin bulged through the squares, making her whole face into a grid. A tetherball court with no ball; a tennis racket with no handle. The sports sucked here. Steve turned on the car, and pulled back, heading towards the on ramp. I kept waving at the kid, who just pressed her face as far as she could into that mesh until I thought she might strain her face right through it.

In the car, the murder mystery whirred back on, and the British voice of the narrator, who liked to do a singsong lilt for the rich woman, resumed. Talking in detail about the manor's garden. Steve merged onto the freeway and moved to the left lane, for speed.

"It's the neighbor," I said.

"What?" He adjusted his rearview mirror. His face looked relaxed, the way it always did right before we fell asleep.

"The neighbor did it," I said.

"Ah!" He slapped the dashboard. "Babe? Don't tell the end!"

He sped up, and we passed several cars, and made record time into the city.