Laura Carraro
Writer and Illustrator
Laura lives in New York with her husband and their rambunctious fox terrier. When not writing, she’s in her studio making art or working with high school students as a writing tutor. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work can be found in Sonora Review, The Brevity Blog, Hippocampus, The Manifest Station, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, and Motherwell. PROOF OF LOVE, a memoir, is out in the world seeking representation. You can see an excerpt below.
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Writing
Writing My Way Off the Floor
Ditched
Wonderland
Ghost Husband
These Boots Were Made for Walking
Struggling to Find my Purpose
Cooking for Two
Excerpt from Proof of Love
A Buck of Regular
Dad wants to go on another car ride. Mom’s made sandwiches, loaded the cooler, and gathered some extra jackets in case it gets cold. She’s already in the car, our white Rambler station wagon, waiting for the rest of us. We’ve been given a minute to get something to play with.
“Let’s go,” Dad calls from the driveway. Despite the heat, he’s wearing a grey sweatshirt with cutoff sleeves, his weekend uniform. I think he’s the most handsome man I’ve ever seen.
Rigby leaps into the car. The rest of us follow.
“Do you have the autoharp?” Dad asks Mom just before we back out of the driveway. He puts the car back in park and she gets out to retrieve it, moving slowly. It’s a hot summer day. The harp was a Christmas present from Dad, even though Mom has never mentioned wanting to play a musical instrument. It’s not a big harp, like the ones angels are always playing in pictures. It’s just a little black triangular thing with push buttons and strings.
Mom never tries to use the push buttons or read music, but as we drive through the countryside, she sets the harp on her lap and strums with a curly tortoise-shell pick while Dad leads us in endless songs. He’s going through a folk music phase. If he starts talking about Burl Ives, he’ll go on forever. Pete Seeger? Dad is an encyclopedia when it comes to Pete Seeger.
We all know the words to the favorites, “This Land is Your Land,” “Where Have all the Flowers Gone?” and “Big Rock Candy Mountain.” He especially loves “King of the Road,” and counts on us to join in enthusiastically at the lines, "No phone, no pool, no pets. I ain’t got no cigarettes. I’m king of the road." When he sings, he smiles, and when he smiles, all is good in the world.
We drive down the road to the gas station to buy “a buck of regular” and have the windshield cleaned. The buck of regular worries me. I am eight years old now, and I have begun to understand that a buck of regular doesn’t always get us as far as we need to go. We’ve run out of gas a couple of times, halting mid-trip on highways, dirt roads, and suburban streets, upending any possible pleasure.
Dad gets angry and kicks something and walks off with his red can, leaving us in the car on the side of a road, either hot or cold, depending on the season, wondering when he’ll return. For some reason, he blames Mom when this happens. The price of gas. The price of food. The price of life. Somehow, his soft leather wallet is always almost empty.
Mom’s explanation for these road trips is that once you have four children, people stop inviting you anywhere. She says the drive-in or the miniature golf course are just too expensive, so this is our family’s way of having fun. But I know it’s a little more complicated than that.
Dad doesn’t like us running off to play with neighborhood kids anymore, and he doesn’t like our mother to have any friends. At home, we do chores all day on Saturday and Sunday unless we’re going somewhere together. Once in a while, car rides are better than chores, but not always.
I sit right behind my parents, so I’m looking at the back of their heads. If I lean up close, I can smell the fresh pouch of tobacco Dad’s got rolled up in his pocket. It smells like our dried leaf pile after it’s rained. Mom’s a Clairol blond. Ash blond, to be exact. From behind, I think she looks like a teenager. She keeps her window up so that her hair won’t fly around in the wind, while Dad keeps his down to rest his lit pipe and forearm in the open air.
I plant my chin on the back of their seat. My father has already wrecked his hearing at the firing range, so this is the only spot in the car to be heard. Just to break her silence, I lean over to ask Mom a question.
“How long do butterflies live?” I ask.
“Ask your father,” she says, but I don’t, because the whole point of the question is to get her to talk.
“Do Eskimos really kiss with their noses?” I try.
“Ask your father.”
I know, just as she does, that if she answers me, he’ll tell her she got it wrong.
“You know, your mother comes from a long line of Polish pig farmers,” Dad says through the rear-view mirror. His pipe smoke wafts into the back of the car with his words.
“If you have strong backs, it’s because you come from peasants. If you have bad eyesight, you’ll know where that came from, too.”
Mom doesn’t say anything back. She never does. I’m glad I can’t see her face because I know that if I did, I could tell that her feelings are hurt. She has small grayish-blue eyes that water up easily. I don’t know about my brothers, but I can usually tell when she’s hiding her feelings. This is not the first time he’s brought up Polish pig farmers. He says it all the time, like a bully pulling hair.
Today there are no pit stops or destinations. We aren’t going to a country fair. We drive by a Carvel. Giant billboards we’re better off not reading tease us with invitations to petting zoos and caverns. This ride is an exploration. If we stop, it will be at an old cemetery or a beaver dam. Once, we stopped at a dilapidated barn, and we all had to get out and help rip chunks of weathered wood from it. There we were, stealing together as a family, stripping away at something that didn’t belong to us. That day, I was relieved to get back in the car.
I feel trapped inside the car. The woven seats feel like sticky straw. Rigby digs her long nails into my bare thighs as she scrambles around unsteadily from one part of the car to another. I’m relieved that I took a big tangle of orange yarn to unknot as a way to entertain myself, but the wool feels hot and sticky on my lap.
I also have the galleys of a textbook Dad’s been editing. I snatched them out of the waste basket beside his desk. I don’t want to actually read the manuscript, but instead have chosen the letter O, and circle it every time it appears. I go through pages and pages of O’s with a dull pencil. I’m immersed in the O’s while Tim and Paul color and play with their Matchbox cars, silently kicking and elbowing each other over territory. Joe reads.
“Who wants to sing?” Dad asks. He teaches us a new song, "Green and Yeller."
This time, Mom doesn’t strum. She reaches into the cooler she’s brought along and doles out Kool-Aid from a yellowed Tupperware pitcher into wax cups and then breaks open a package of wafer cookies. They’re orange tinted waffle-imprinted cookies with a thin cream filling, the least expensive cookie you can buy, dry as dirt and as chalky and tasteless as powdered milk but they’re Mom’s favorites. Her homemade baked goods are exclusively for dessert after dinner. As she passes out the waffle cookies, Dad stops singing to insist on “only one each.” She gives us two.
I sing along to the words of "Green and Yeller" while I try to make the little cookies last as long as I can. My brothers and I can only remember the chorus. “Mother be quick, I’ve got to be sick, and lay me down to die.” Dad laughs his multi-syllabic laugh.
“Heh, heh, heh, heh.”
Whoever can delight Dad is the winner. We yell out the words.
“Green and yeller. Green and yeller.”
Paul and Joe start squabbling about who gets to sit where. They shift constantly, climbing over each other, pushing away the dog, and trying to wedge into the perfect space between the cooler and the picnic basket. The Rambler has a rear-facing bench seat we call “the way back.” Right now, they’re fighting about who gets to go back there.
Dad stops the car and makes us all get out. Mom stays in the car.
“I’m going to make you walk,” he yells at us from the shoulder. We stand in the weeds with our heads down as cars rush by. He’s pacing.
“I’ll drive away and leave you here if you can’t behave.”
I try hard not to smirk or even look up or else somebody might get swatted. There isn’t really anything funny about this situation. Sometimes I worry that Dad really will drive away. I once dropped a little blue hat out of the window and watched from the way back as it got smaller and smaller and smaller until it finally disappeared.
I think about us standing there on the road as our parents drive away, my mother watching us become specks, little hats not worth turning around for, as Dad continues on his car ride. I’m not sure how well Mom would do alone with Dad, and I don’t know how I would manage with Joe suddenly in charge.
Once we get back in the Rambler, everyone is quiet. It’s blazing in the car, worse now that we’ve stopped. I’m a prisoner. I set aside the O’s and force myself to sleep.
***
“Get out. Get out.” I’m just waking up and don’t know what’s going on. This worries me. What happened?
But when Dad gets out and stretches, I study his face and don’t see any anger.
“Look at that,” he says.
The thing about Dad is you never know what’s going to get him excited, but you better be ready to get excited with him, even when you’re not. It can be a cluster of mushrooms or an abandoned bird’s nest. I don’t know what he sees, but I obey and leave the car.
“Everybody get some containers. Pour out that Kool-Aid.” He pulls out his soft blue pouch of tobacco, repacks and lights his pipe. Then he points down a ditch at the side of the road.
There are rows and rows of berry bushes. Blackberries. You can tell from the road that they’re ripe. We hunt in the car for containers, and then climb down the little ravine to get to the brambles. Rigby lopes in front of us. The berries are so ripe, they’re dropping. We endure deep thorn scratches on our bare arms and legs and bug bites on our feet, eating as many berries as we put into our containers. They’re so pulpy, they become juice in our hands, staining our fingers and our lips.
I’m relieved to see that Mom’s right in there, too, talking about making berry pancakes in the morning and helping little Tim up to reach.
“Maybe I can make some jelly if we get enough,” she says.
I feel drunk from the berries, tie-dyed by their juices. I wander off a little bit with the sand bucket I pulled out of the back of the Rambler, going on towards another thicket just a few feet down the road. My mission is to hit the blackberry jackpot. I want to be able to run back to Dad and tell him that I have found the mother lode, and then he will look at me and say, “Look at that, Daughter. That’s the best thicket of berries ever discovered.” Once they have depleted their section, my family will continue over to my thicket and maybe stay for a while. Joe and Paul will wish they had found it.
But I have bad luck. There’s always something that pops my bubble, something that makes me feel different from my brothers, and there it is, nailed to a telephone pole just a couple of feet away: a weathered red and white warning sign. I practically walk into it.
NO TRESSPASSING.
“We have to go,” I say, tugging at Dad’s sweatshirt and pointing at the sign. I’ve run back to him to deliver this urgent message. He gives me a sour look that I know says Stop it, but I can’t. I back up the twiggy incline toward the car, but nobody else moves. Not even the dog. Nobody even looks up at me. I call out to them, but it’s as though they don’t hear. They have decided not to hear me. What do you do with fear when nobody else feels it?
“Come on!” I yell. “Come on. Come on. Come on.”
The Lord’s Prayer says, “Forgive us our trespasses and we shall forgive those who trespass against us.” Is this the kind of trespassing that prayer is about? I’ve already become more like Dad than Mom, finding church and religion even worse than car rides. I only pray when Mom tells me to or when I really need something.
I decide to pray right there on the roadside. Nobody’s ever actually taught me how to pray except for bedtime and dinnertime, so my prayers usually start like letters and lead to promises before I get around to asking for a favor.
Dear God,
I know I never pray anymore, but if you do this one thing for me, I promise I’ll go back to doing it every day. Please make sure my father doesn’t get arrested. Or shot.
While my family continues to poach berries, I holler down to them.
I consider going back to my praying and adding, "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,"but I decide against it.
“We have to go. We have to go. Please, can we go?” I point to the sign. “We’re trespassing.”
Eventually Dad looks up and asks me why I always have to spoil everything.
“You worry too much,” he yells. “Don’t be such a girl.” It feels like I’m being pushed to the ground. I wonder why I can’t delight him anymore. Not the way I used to. I wonder what’s wrong with being a Polish pig farmer. I wonder what’s wrong with me.
For a while, I keep vigil, leaning up against the bumper and scanning the road in both directions, checking the fields beyond the berry bushes in case an irate farmer shows up holding a shotgun. I call out a few more warnings to them while I listen for the dreaded siren of a police cruiser. But it’s so hot and buggy, I eventually get back inside the car and soothe myself with my O’s.
I know already that Dad won’t talk to me for the whole ride home and, because of that, neither will anyone else. I only hope we’ll make it home on the buck of regular.
The Seder
The Seder is a user friendly Haggadah for beginners as well as anyone looking to honor Passover and eat before ten at night.