Shaggy

We’re on the Thruway, with the rhythmic swipe of lazy wipers, a sad and cold night beyond the foggy windshield—and my boy says from the back seat, Make sure it isn't a shaggy hotel. He has his head down, watching a SpongeBob DVD. I laugh and catch the lighted dashboard of a car passing alongside me on the highway. I wonder about the driver—alone in his car—and where he’s headed on a night like this; I wonder, too, how my boy would know about such things as a shaggy hotel. The boy in the back that I have wrapped my armored self around so the world cannot get at him.

No, I say, smiling, no shaggy hotel room for us. And we drive a few more miles along the Thruway, up around the capital, and continue heading west. Rain falls in heavy drops that are almost snow. Too early for that, even up here where deserted factories sit silent and decayed just beyond the highway, their windows like cracked teeth. All the life exhaled out of them a long time ago… I do not want my son to know this. The inherent sadness up here, the loss, the fear that creeps like rust along your bones, your spirit. I am an Upstate girl, moved away many years back. What is there to give him from that? My friend Sally, in her braids and her blackness, tells her blonde-haired daughter that she is a black girl. Remember that, she tells her. And what do I have to give my boy to remember? A closed fist that, once opened, is empty. Like our bellies long ago, our pockets…

The rain has stopped and night time is undiluted beyond the car windows. I feel a heaviness creeping along my neck, in the muscles in my jaw, behind my eyes. I watch for a hotel sign beckoning from the highway. And eventually it appears: a grating yellow sign for a hotel that I’m hoping won’t be shaggier than the two of us can handle. At the end of the exit ramp, a tired green sign tries to announce two local points of interest. But the images are too faded to read. Beyond, is the raffish yellow sign of the hotel, a gas station, and a bit further down the road, a diner flashing neon. The rest—if there is anything out there—is shrouded in night time. I follow the sign for the hotel, driving over a corrugated parking lot, and park between two pick-up trucks.

Inside, the woman behind the desk wears a stained and pallid polo shirt with the logo of the hotel on the lapel. She is weighted down by life, by junk food consumed in front of the TV. Her sooty hair is pulled straight back into a ponytail secured by a brown rubber band. She wears smudged, wire-rimmed glasses. And when we come in, my boy and me, she flashes a genuine smile—revealing the telltale sign of her poverty. And suddenly I remember sitting in Janie’s kitchen all those years ago, as Janie took pliers to her mouth, and pulled out her own howling tooth. My mother and me across the table from her, sipping tea—the only thing left in the cupboards before we walked down to the armory the next day for the government cheese, for the free black & white cans labeled “meat.”

The woman at the check-in desk engages my son, chats with me—and I am audacious, dismissive. Wrinkle my nose, want to know about the room, wave a self righteous hand in disdain when the woman asks whether I want a smoking or non-smoking room. Behind her on the wall is a typed sign that says there is a $10.00 fee for pets. I show my horror at such a thing as pets in a hotel.

And the woman behind the counter in her rubber band ponytail and her melancholy teeth is patient, kind. Doesn't expose me for the fraud I am--the daughter of a Welfare mother, who is obviously still running, still trying to shake the rust from her shoes. I enter my Westchester address on the form, give her my 914 area code, wait for her reaction. And of course there is none. She smiles, hands me the room key, wishes me a lovely night, teases my son. And, she adds, as we head for our room, there is continental breakfast in the morning. And as we pass the counter where breakfast will be set up, my son squeals in delight at the cereal dispenser, and skips down the carpeted hallway of this shaggy hotel tonight.
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