motorhome
Or anyhow it is a story in which science fiction nearly factors.
When I was seven years old, my parents obtained a small motorhome. I do not know how this came to pass, or why. I only knew that one day I came home from school to find our pebble driveway occupied, in the way that an army might occupy, by a massive structure of metal and fading green paint. It sat astride my hopscotch board like leviathan, shimmering with menace and the heat of the Texas sun. It was beautiful.
The neighbors gathered around to remark upon it. My brother had already named it Ankylosaurus, and was attempting to scale its massive spare tire. I heard my father mutter something like “rocinante” before turning to assure Mr. Dubois that yes, indeed, it had been a steal...but it was years before I understood the reference. Conversations with my father often went like that.
Ankylosaurus was a lumbering mystery to my brother and I. The curved steel plates that made up its armor skin were dented with age and adventure. We patted our hands over it, ouching at the burning metal. We poked fingers into the rusty dimples of its rivets. We swung like a worshipful monkey tribe from its door handle while my father continued to assure the neighbors of his financial acumen. This beast was going places. We could not believe it was ours.
My nearly teenaged sister eyed it with the weary skepticism of one who sees her poolside summer slipping away, and slouched into the house. She missed the best part.
My father finally tore himself away from Mr. Smith. With a magician-like flourish, he peeled my brother from the door handle, turned the knob in some mysterious fashion, and stepped back. I think I imagined the whooshing noise, but there was a distinct and rather solemn smell of mildew. I felt a little frightened. My father gestured us with a bow into the Holy of Holies. We went inside, squinting against the dark.
Inside Ankylosaurus was damp, and warm, and covered in shag carpet. That was my first rather suffocated impression. Then my father swung open the other door, cunningly concealed at the back of the trailer, and i got a sundazzled impression of orange. Orange and olive green. Akylosaurus was a child of the 70s, and wore his colors proudly, in chipped formica and with fine nearly-chrome accents.
I was madly in love.
In the last hot days of school I explored him like an archaeologist. In vain, my mother explained that ships and other vessels were usually referred to as ‘she’. That got perfectly matching eyerolls from all of us, even my sister. Who ever heard of a dinosaur being a girl?
You can imagine the biological discussions that went on in my household. And how simple an explanation we probably had for the extinction.
So I explored him, stem to stern. I swiveled in the imposing captain’s seat, resplendently pleather in its own alcove, with the copilot’s seat beside it like a loyal sidekick. I stretched my feet out to the pedals, and spun the steering wheel with all my might. I scampered up to the cunningly hidden bunk above the driver’s compartment. I poked through the dollhouse cupboards of the tiny kitchen, unearthing strata of ancient dishes and rust flecked camping cutlery. I swept a wide swath of the driveway with the tiny broom that lived tucked next to the stove, and wore the tiny mop as an elegant wig. I bounced on the cushions of the long, bench sofa, and watched the sunbeams play in the cloud of dust that puffed up around me.
While I explored, Ankylosaurus filled up. Suitcases in the niche below the kitchen-bench-that-became-a-bed. Diapers for the baby in the tiny bathroom closet. Jars of peanut butter. A Darth-Vader-Head case full of my brother’s Star Wars dolls.
“Action Figures!”
“They’re dolls! Just like Barbie!”
Pillows and blankets and my sister’s nail polish collection (what could possibly go wrong?). A cooler filled with tiny, fascinating cans of apple juice. And, on the last day, a Book.
I could tell it was mine by the way my mother looked at it, with that wrinkle of concern which I had come to know meant How can this weird little creature be related to me? But my mother was a tough one. She didn’t argue, merely asked one question in her cool, low voice.
“The Lord of the Rings? She’s seven years old.”
My father knew an opening salvo when he heard one. “She loved The Hobbit. And it’s all three books together. Bound in one.”
Maternal silence. Maternal eyebrow raised in a skeptical arc.
“It was on sale.”
On Sale was a magical talisman in its own right, the final word in financial acumen; the book went into Ankylosaurus. I looked at it, perched mysterious and fat on the single little bookshelf, beside the Rand McNally Road Atlas and Dr. Andrew Weil’s Guide to Herbal Medicine. It was mine. And my mother objected to it. And there would be hobbits. There could not be a more exciting thing in the world.
And then it was the day, with the baby strapped in wailing to his plastic seat, and my sister ensconcing herself with a glare in the upper bunk, and my father pulling away from our house in a clash of gears and a billow of diesel smoke.
My brother and I knelt facing backward on the long sofa, watching the adventure unfold. Southeast Texas unfurled before our eyes while my parents argued over the atlas. Pine trees. Swamps and rice fields. And pine trees. And swamps. And refineries. And swamps. And another rice field.
The adventure was coming a little more slowly than I’d expected. Finally, overcome by the smell of melting asphalt, I sank down into the cushions to read my book.
There were, at least, hobbits. I discovered with a certain horror that my funny friend Bilbo had turned into an old person. I watched the new guys with suspicion. I smiled over Tom Bombadil and puzzled over nearly everything else. I squinted at the tiny type. I finally took to skipping huge swaths of text in search of something exciting, like wizards, or dinners. That moved the plot along a bit. I plowed doggedly on. There was absolutely no way I was going to admit to my mom that the book was, after all, too hard for me.
Finally, I gave it up for a bad job, and helped my brother stretch his legs. This was a wonderful exercise, in which we marched, high step and single file, from the front of the mobile home to the back. And back again. Single file was the only possible order of march, as the single narrow aisle would not allow for anything more egalitarian. There were two turnarounds, one achieved by scrambling over the baby and looping around around the kitchen table; the other by stepping smartly into the bathroom for an about-face. These naturally became the sites of political squabbles. I took the traditionalist stance.
“I’m older, so I get to go first!”
My brother, a natural tactician, wasted little time in argument. He took over the kitchen table, declared the revolution, and began to build a barricade.
I considered my position, and found it to be a bad one. He held the table. If he took the bathroom as well, he would always be able to go first. I was clearly going to have to resort to strong measures.
I looked at the narrow aisle. I looked down at my smocked sundress. It was far too brief for my purposes, but was, at least, a reassuring navy blue. And if I squinted, the flowered embroidery might look a little bit like stars. Still, I pulled out a beach towel and wrapped it around my shoulders, to add gravitas to my costume.
The mop was too unwieldy, but the broom was just about right. I hefted it experimentally, then turned it over. Yes. If I squinted, the bristles could nearly be mysterious firebolts.
Clearly the book had simply omitted the part about mysterious firebolts. And stars.
I banged the broom down on the floor and made my stand.
“You cannot pass!”
My brother peeked, puzzled, over his battlements. He wasn’t trying to pass, after all. I pressed my point with two sharper cracks of the broom.
“You cannot pass!”
A Chewbacca doll came hurtling over the barricade at my head. I batted it off with wizardly contempt.
“You cannot pass!”
Chewbacca’s legs, never the same since the baby had used them for a teething ring, flew off his body entirely and were lost forever. This proved to be too much for mortal flesh to bear. My brother came swarming over the kitchen table with an inarticulate cry of rage, gathering up the mop as he came.
The battle was an epic one. His mop, while clearly a lightsaber, was well matched by my (somehow not mentioned in the book but obviously) smoking wizard’s staff. He went for the eyes. I parried and tried a sweep to the knees. The sounds of our blows rang over the road rattle of Ankylosaurus. Crockery shattered. The baby shrieked. My sister poked her head over the side of the bunk and retreated back into her sulk.
A silence grew around us, as if the world was holding still. This must be a place of great concentration. My brother renewed his offensive in a terrible flurry of mophead and fury. I howled a powerful magical spell, but was driven back. I cried my spell again, and there was a burst of terrible light.
Neither of us had, of course, noticed the motorhome grinding to a stop. And neither of us noticed my father opening the back door. But the burst of sudden sunlight was more than enough to convince me of my real wizardly powers, even before I flew gracefully backward through the door, to land headfirst on the fine, gritty concrete of the highway median.
Fortunately, Louisiana is well supplied with emergency rooms. But we never did get the blood out of that beach towel.
My mother bought me a present in the hospital gift shop. Little Women.
I think she’d forgotten it was about the Civil War.
Kara Coryell, 2012
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