Somewhere Else

By the beginning of summer, Laura had been home for almost three weeks and was already beginning to feel as though she had never left college.

It wasn't that she disliked being home. She liked her mother's cooking and the familiarity of the house, the way she could walk barefoot into the kitchen in the morning and know exactly where everything would be. Her father had learned to ask about school without turning every conversation into an inquiry about the future, and after three years they had all become better at understanding that Laura could come home without becoming the girl who had left.

Still, there were moments when the old life seemed to close around her.

Her mother might ask what time she expected to be home. Her father might remind her about something that needed doing with the car. Neither question was unreasonable, which somehow made her reaction to them more difficult to explain. She loved these people. She was living in their house. Wanting to know whether she would be home for dinner was hardly an assault on her independence.

But Laura was beginning to understand that independence was not always won through confrontation. Sometimes it revealed itself quietly, when a perfectly ordinary question no longer fit as comfortably as it once had.

So when two friends from college called and suggested a road trip down the California coast, Laura said yes before she knew much about the plan.

There wasn't much to know.

They would drive south for a week, perhaps ten days. Lisa had an aunt near Santa Barbara who had offered them a place to stay for several nights. After that they might continue to Los Angeles and possibly San Diego, although nobody seemed particularly committed to reaching either one. They had a car, enough money if they were careful, and considerably more summer than organization.

Laura found the arrangement appealing.

Her mother found it less so.

At dinner that evening she wanted to know where they intended to stay after Santa Barbara. When Laura explained that they hadn't decided, her mother repeated the answer as though perhaps Laura would hear the problem the second time.

“We'll find someplace.”

“That's not a plan.”

“No,” Laura admitted. “That's sort of the point.”

Her mother looked across the table toward Laura's father, who had apparently decided that a discussion between two adult women did not automatically require his participation.

Eventually he asked the question that interested him.

“Whose car?”

“Lisa's.”

“Reliable?”

“As far as I know.”

“What about the tires?”

Laura laughed. “I have no idea.”

“Find out.”

Her mother looked at him. “That's all you're going to say?”

He considered the question for a moment. “She knows how to use a telephone.”

It wasn't permission. Laura no longer needed permission. But it was close enough to a blessing that she took it.

They left Saturday morning with far too much luggage.

Three women who had spent most of the year living in dormitories and small apartments somehow managed to fill nearly every available space in Lisa's car for a trip lasting little more than a week. Shoes occupied an especially unreasonable portion of the trunk. Lisa discovered four pairs she claimed could not possibly belong to one person, and the resulting investigation ended when everyone agreed that counting shoes served no useful purpose.

They drove away laughing.

For the first hour they talked almost continuously. A few weeks apart had apparently created an obligation to report everything that had happened since the semester ended: summer jobs, parents, brothers and sisters, people they had seen and people they were making considerable efforts not to see.

Eventually conversation became less urgent. The windows were open, and music played from the radio until they drove beyond the reach of one station and began searching for another.

Laura put her bare feet on the dashboard.

Lisa glanced over. “Feet down.”

“You sound like my mother.”

“Your mother doesn't own this car.”

Laura considered the logic and lowered her feet.

For the first night they chose a motel primarily because it was inexpensive and close enough to the beach to walk. Only after paying for the room did they discover that it contained two beds for three women.

Lisa immediately claimed that driving entitled her to an entire bed. The other two rejected the proposition on the grounds that operating a motor vehicle for several hours did not constitute a disability requiring private accommodations.

They eventually shared.

The next morning they walked to the beach carrying coffee in paper cups and sat on the sand while the marine layer gradually burned away. The Pacific was gray at first and then increasingly blue as the sun strengthened.

For nearly an hour nobody suggested doing anything.

Laura liked that.

College had taught her to divide time into useful units. An hour could contain a lecture, a run, part of a paper, half a practice session. Even leisure sometimes seemed to require justification because anything not accomplished now would have to be accomplished later.

On the beach an hour simply passed.

They continued south sometime before noon.

The coast appeared and disappeared as the highway moved inland and then returned to the water. Without an itinerary, they stopped whenever something interested them. A roadside fruit stand cost them twenty minutes. Seals lying on rocks below the highway cost them nearly an hour. None of these stops would have survived a carefully prepared schedule, which Laura increasingly regarded as an argument in their favor.

By the time they reached Santa Barbara, Lisa's aunt was waiting with the mixture of hospitality and mild alarm appropriate to three young women arriving with enough luggage for a much longer expedition.

Her house was several blocks from the water, with a small guest room, a sofa, and a patio where they ate dinner that first evening. Lisa's aunt asked about college and eventually arrived at the question adults seemed unable to resist.

“What are you studying?”

Laura told her.

“And what are you going to do with that?”

Laura laughed. “I knew that was coming.”

“Everyone asks?”

“Everyone.”

Her aunt smiled. “Do you know?”

“Not really.”

Laura noticed that the admission no longer embarrassed her.

“Good,” the woman said, raising her glass.

Laura looked at her. “Good?”

“You've got plenty of time to know later.”

And that was the end of it.

Laura liked her immediately.

They spent several days in Santa Barbara, walking along the waterfront, wandering through shops and eating lunches they couldn't quite afford. They discovered that sharing appetizers was an effective way to protect a vacation budget and that shopping immediately afterward could undo the savings with remarkable efficiency.

One afternoon Laura found a dress she liked.

She didn't need it. That fact seemed to improve it.

One of her friends examined the price tag and reminded Laura that their money was supposed to last another week. Laura held the dress against herself and looked in the mirror.

“I know.”

“And you're buying it anyway?”

“Yes.”

Her friend considered her reflection. “Good.”

Laura bought the dress.

There were decisions in life that deserved analysis. Apparently this wasn't one of them.

On their third evening they went to a restaurant near the water and afterward found a bar where a band was playing. The place was crowded without being unpleasantly so, and they managed to find a table near the back. A group of men about their age occupied another table nearby, and sometime during the evening the two groups became one. Someone borrowed a chair, someone else made a joke, and introductions followed with the casual efficiency of young people who had no reason to make the occasion more complicated than it was.

One of the men ended up sitting beside Laura.

His name was David.

He lived in Southern California and was spending the summer working for an uncle. He was tall, sunburned across the nose, and possessed the easy physical confidence Laura associated with people who had grown up around beaches.

At first they went through the usual questions—where they were from, where they went to school, what year they were—and Laura began to wonder whether meeting someone new always required completing a small application.

Fortunately David seemed to tire of it at about the same time.

He was funny, though not in the deliberate way of men who wanted a room to know they were funny. He told stories well and, more unusually, could allow a pause in the conversation without immediately rushing to fill it. Laura noticed that. She also noticed his hands, his smile, and the way he looked directly at her when she spoke.

When the band began another set, David asked her to dance.

Laura glanced toward her friends and discovered they were already standing. Apparently whatever decision she might have made had been overtaken by events.

Later, after the room became too loud for conversation, David asked whether she wanted to walk.

She did.

Outside, the air was cool enough that Laura wished she had brought a sweater. They headed toward the water, passing restaurants beginning to empty and shops already dark for the night. Without the others around them, their conversation changed. David told her about a relationship that had ended earlier that year. Laura listened and offered less about her own romantic history. She thought briefly of the man from the party after the recital, but there seemed no particular reason to introduce him into an evening several hundred miles away.

David eventually asked whether she had a boyfriend.

“No.”

He looked slightly embarrassed. “Was that too direct?”

“A little.”

“Sorry.”

Laura smiled. “I answered.”

At the beach they stopped above the sand. Lights from the waterfront were strong enough to illuminate the breaking waves but not the ocean beyond them.

David took her hand.

Laura let him.

There was no need to decide what that meant either.

They walked for a while before sitting on a low wall overlooking the beach. The conversation wandered through places they wanted to visit, music, bad summer jobs, families, and finally the question Laura seemed unable to escape even in California: what they intended to do with their lives.

When David asked, she gave him a look.

“You too?”

He laughed. “I was just asking.”

“I don't know.”

“Good.”

Laura had now heard that response often enough to become suspicious of it. “Why does everyone suddenly think that's a good answer?”

“Because I don't know either.”

That seemed fair.

David kissed her sometime afterward.

There was nothing particularly cinematic about it. No moon appeared at the appropriate moment. Music did not drift toward them from somewhere along the beach. Laura would remember those absences later, perhaps because the kiss itself required so little assistance from the surroundings.

He kissed her, and she kissed him back.

They remained by the water for a while.

When Laura finally returned to the house, her friends were still awake. One of them asked whether she'd had a nice walk, placing enough emphasis on walk to make the question considerably less innocent than it sounded.

Laura said she had.

“A long walk.”

“Apparently.”

The next question was David's name.

Laura attempted indignation and discovered she wasn't sufficiently committed to it. They laughed quietly to avoid waking Lisa's aunt.

Laura saw David again the following evening. Her friends joined them at first and then, through a process nobody acknowledged, found other things to do. She saw him once more before they left Santa Barbara.

On the morning of their departure, David came by while they were packing the car.

Neither of them attempted to make the few days larger than they had been. There was no promise to call every night or plan for a reunion. David gave Laura his address, and she gave him hers.

“Maybe I'll see you again,” he said.

“Maybe.”

Laura meant it.

She also understood that she might not.

The uncertainty did not diminish what had happened.

Her friends remained suspiciously quiet while David walked back to his car. Lisa waited until he had driven away before looking at Laura.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“You're doing something.”

“What am I doing?”

“That face.”

“I don't have a face.”

Lisa started the car. “You definitely have a face.”

Laura settled into the passenger seat. “Drive.”

They continued south.

After Santa Barbara the trip became even less organized. They spent a night in Los Angeles with someone one of the women knew from high school and drove through neighborhoods they recognized from television, discovering that famous places contained considerably more traffic than television suggested.

They went to the beach again and stayed too long. Someone got sunburned. Their money began disappearing more rapidly than planned, so dinners became hamburgers and lunches increasingly involved groceries. At one motel they discovered that the swimming pool remained open until ten and spent most of the evening there rather than going anywhere else.

They talked about men and parents and what they might do after college. They talked about one another with enough honesty to produce occasional irritation, followed usually by laughter once everyone had decided the offense wasn't worth maintaining.

One night Laura lay awake for a while after the other two became quiet and realized she hadn't thought about school all day.

She couldn't remember the last time that had happened.

The realization pleased her, and then she went to sleep.

They turned north before reaching San Diego.

Money made that decision with greater authority than any of them had managed. There was enough left for gasoline and inexpensive motels if they were careful, so they bought groceries instead of restaurant meals and ate sandwiches at roadside stops.

Nobody seemed disappointed.

By then the trip mattered less for where they were going than for the simple fact that they had gone.

The return drive had a different quality. Road signs gradually began naming places associated with home rather than somewhere else. The landscape became familiar. Conversation was quieter, not from unhappiness but from the recognition that the small temporary life they had made together was coming to an end.

They dropped one friend off first. Her parents came outside to help unload the luggage, and the remaining contents of the car shifted into the newly available space.

Then Lisa and Laura continued.

They reached Laura's house in late afternoon. Her mother came outside before Laura had made it to the front door and hugged her. Her father appeared a moment later.

He looked at the car.

“How were the tires?”

Laura stared at him.

“Fine.”

“Good.”

She laughed and hugged him too.

Inside, the house looked almost exactly as it had when she left.

That surprised her more than it should have.

For more than a week Laura had awakened in unfamiliar rooms, traveled roads she had never seen, made decisions without explaining them to anyone, and met people her parents would probably never know. She had walked beside the Pacific holding the hand of a man she hadn't known two days earlier and kissed him without needing to know whether she would ever see him again.

Meanwhile, the kitchen had remained the kitchen.

Her mother asked whether she wanted dinner.

“Absolutely.”

Laura carried her suitcase upstairs.

The new dress was folded inside. David's address was tucked into a side pocket. Sand remained in one of her shoes despite having shaken it out twice.

Her room had the same peculiar stillness it always acquired while she was away. She sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, looking at the things she'd left behind.

She had once imagined independence primarily as leaving—first the ranch, then the familiar expectations of childhood, perhaps eventually whatever future other people had imagined for her. But the trip hadn't felt like leaving anything.

Home had been here the entire time.

She had simply gone somewhere else.

Laura got up and opened the window. From downstairs she could hear her mother moving around the kitchen and her father saying something she couldn't quite make out.

She put David's address on the desk rather than throwing it away, left the suitcase unpacked, and went downstairs for dinner.