Outside Looking In by T.C. Boyle

Author:T.C. Boyle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-02-19T16:00:00+00:00

4.

They made up a motley caravan, five cars in various colors and states of repair strung out in a gleaming procession along the clean white turnpike that sliced through the heart of Massachusetts. Before they even got going she’d already heard half a dozen quips about the Joads (“Don’t call me an Okie,” Charlie shouted, “I’m a Beantowner!” to which Alice added, “Ex-Beantowner,” and Ken, clowning, cried out “Ma, Ma! Where’s Pa?”). They’d gathered in the parking lot of a shopping center that was convenient to the turnpike at the appointed hour—eight A.M.—and stood around sipping coffee out of cardboard containers and taking delicate semicircular bites out of doughnuts until everybody was there. The last to arrive were Royce and Susannah Eggers, in a rust-spotted Pontiac with a pair of front wheels that let out an exasperated screech when Royce swung into the lot.

They were towing a trailer piled high with all sorts of junk—kids’ bicycles, end tables, mattresses and bed frames, a birdcage, a basketball hoop and God knew what else, the intimate exfoliations of a life lived apart from the group. Though they had a trailer themselves, the smallest thing U-Haul offered because they’d got rid of practically everything and that was all the space they needed, Joanie couldn’t help wondering what Royce and Susannah were thinking—they’d all be together soon, in the Alte Haus, which was furnished, or at least mostly so, and none of this stuff, this junk, would hold any meaning for any of them. It struck her then, as her friends milled around talking in quiet voices, lighting cigarettes, licking powdered sugar from their thumbs and forefingers, that this was the last time they’d appear as separate families, with separate vehicles and separate possessions, that they were finally going to come together as one and live not in the past but in the now.

Royce, mopping his bald head—he was sweating, though it was overcast and still relatively cool—kept saying, “Jesus, I hope it’s not going to rain. I mean, I should’ve got a tarp to cover all this crap with, but you know how it is, everything right down to the last minute—”

“I hear you,” Ken said, and he had something in his hand, pinched between two fingers, that wasn’t a cigarette. He offered it first to her, and though she’d had little experience of marijuana and Tim’s prohibition rang in her head (It’s illegal!), she took it gladly, hungrily—she was high on the moment, as excited and sweetly expectant as she could ever remember being, and she figured why not be higher still?

She glanced up at Fitz then—he was just across the lot, not thirty feet away, where they’d parked to leave room for the others, since he’d insisted on getting here first. He kept circling the car, peering under it, checking the trailer hitch and tightening and retightening the ropes he’d secured their things with. He was nervous, she could see that, nervous about the whole business. He’d arranged for a leave of absence, telling McClelland how much he regretted having come under Dr.

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