Birth of a Woman

On a recent road trip that culminated in a Quebec City emergency room (see: “Je me souviens” below), our first stop was in a town about an hour or so west of Albany, in upstate New York. I was with my daughters: the younger, eleven; the elder, a couple of months shy of fifteen. On the long car ride from Providence, they had been reading aloud for me the first book in the Harry Potter series.

Nice family moment, a touching example of daughterly solicitude for their father’s inner life.

Just off the Thruway, there was a strip of motels. The Best Western. No vacancies. Days Inn. No rooms.

We were told there was some sort of gambling convention in town. We might not find anything.

Desperate, we pulled into a ramshackle place called Happy Journey, half-hidden by a highway overpass and a sign announcing “Only $50 a Night!”

Sitting in the lobby’s sole folding chair was an unhappy, stringbean of a fellow, in a filthy t-shirt and soiled jeans. He was barefoot, and his feet were not pretty. Some sort of infection. In his hands, he held a cob of corn, which he toyed with as he watched us wordlessly.

The clerk emerged from a back room and came to us at the desk. He was south Asian – Pakistani or Indian – and the whites of his eyes were the color of cherry tomatoes. And around his left eye was a dark and angry bruise, as if someone had landed a good punch there not so long ago.

As he fumbled to find us a key, a large middle-aged black man came into the lobby. He was way too happy, he was flying. “I’m looking for my daughter!” he explained with a laugh. “Anyone here seen my daughter?”

By this time stringbean had left and we had our key. We walked across the lot and saw stringbean go into a room. At the window a disheveled woman looked out from the darkness. He did not turn on the light.

Our room, a few doors down, was lit by a naked lightbulb. There was a lumpy double bed, draped with a greenish-yellowish coverlet, a couch of a similar color, and a tv on a stand. The walls were slightly stained. Obviously, the place had not had a deep cleaning since about 1964. And in the bathroom, a pipe protruded from the wall above the bath. There was no shower head, just a pipe.

I sighed and tried to make the best of it. Look, I started saying, it’s only for one night. We won’t bring in all our stuff. We’ll just go to sleep and get up early. It’s already late and we don’t want to drive around all night trying to find a room. You heard them say at the other places that everything’s booked up around here…

I looked searchingly at my younger daughter’s face. Sure, Daddy, she said. We can do that. It’s fine.

Then I turned to the older one.

She looked into my eyes. The look she gave me was not the one of a daughter to a father. I recognized that instantly. No, this was something entirely different, something as timeless as the Garden of Eden.

At last she spoke: “I am not staying here.”

Une femme est née.