Tallulahland by Lynn Messina

Author:Lynn Messina
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Red Dress Ink
Published: 2004-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

5

We stop in Dinwiddie, Virginia, for lunch. The restaurant Nick picks is a truck stop called the Sandman. It’s a roadside diner that sells greasy French fries, oil-soaked onion rings and hamburgers so rare they drip with juice. This is not the fare I requested. It’s not the fried green tomatoes and hush puppies and grits that we Southerners always eat, but it’s good food and it’s filling and it leaves me with a contented smile on my face. I give Nick a thumbs-up and don’t complain when he flips compulsively through Dinwiddie’s radio stations. Even with one of his favorite CDs in the player, he has to take a random sampling of what the town has to offer.

We are back on the road for almost an hour before I spot a Wal-Mart off I-85. The building is wide and flat and ugly. It’s a squat structure that sits on a vast concrete plain like a large rock in the desert and offers up insults to the sun. This is what happens when you put function before form. These cinder-block bunkers and steel-corrugated boxes are what you get when you don’t strike a balance between usefulness, practicality and beauty. But this store is not a statement or an architectural achievement. It’s just a place to buy tents and pressboard furniture, and I can accept that. My eyes don’t have to meet beauty everywhere they turn. They don’t always have to be amazed and humbled by the simple perfection of other people’s ideas.

As we walk in, Nick snags a shopping cart. He has had several hours now to digest my plan and he’s written a shopping list of his own made up of things other than Goldfish and tents.

“We need toilet paper,” he says, strolling briskly down the book aisle. Here are paper goods but not the ones he’s looking for. “Or I should say, you need toilet paper. Being a man, I’ve pretty much got that one covered.”

Nick is smiling smugly. There are few times when he’s able to claim biological superiority and I let this one slide. “Fine, but don’t pee in the corner like you’re marking your territory.”

“All right, how about I pee in the corner like I’m peeing in the corner?”

We walk by bright red tomatoes and fresh ears of sweet corn and Golden delicious apples looking golden and delicious. This is a Super Wal-Mart and we have wandered into the section that makes it super.

Nick sees me eyeing the corn and hands me a plastic bag. “Here, go get a few ears. And pick up some bell peppers and portobello mushrooms while you’re at it. I’ll find hot dogs, buns and relish.”

I take the bag but stare at him, confused. He’s pulling together a barbecue, that much is obvious, but I don’t know how. “You understand that it’s a completely empty lot? There aren’t going to be barbecue pits and other campers there.”

He hands me his list. “Item number four.”

Of course his list is numbered. “Hibachi grill.

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