Our

Story

by

Lawrence Abby Gauthier

ace reporter

The Westphalia Periodic News

An unfolding story...

Our wedding day, 2022...

A county courthouse

 in the mountains.

Culley Jane said: “Guess what day it is today?”

“Tuesday?” I guessed.

She checked the calendar on her iPhone. She checks everything on her iPhone. It makes it hard for me to make things up and get away with it. “No,” she said. “Guess again.”

“Wednesday?”

“It’s our wedding anniversary.”

That was great news to me. I had been struggling with what to write about for this week’s “Our Story” column. Greta Thunberg was approaching Gaza aboard the Peace Flotilla. There was talk of a government shutdown. Why, really, had Charlie been shot… was there more to the story than what meets the eye?

I really didn’t want to spend my writing time chasing falling knives.

I had planned on interviewing a local behind-the-scenes political operative about the movement to create a National Infrastructure Bank and write about that. But he was too busy just now to get together with me for a sit-down interview. I thought maybe he was avoiding me after reading some of my past columns and seeing the way I write to report the news. But, nah, I was just being paranoid.

I was staring at a blank computer screen when Culley Jane asked me if I knew what day it was.

A couple years before we got married in a courthouse in the mountains, we first met one another on an internet dating site. It was the fall of 2019, just before Covid. I had just retired after 20 years as an over-the-road trucker. She had recently retired as a tenured university professor. She had a PhD in French but didn’t introduce herself as “Doctor Culley Jane.” I said that if I had a PhD I’d want everybody to call me Doctor.

Our first date was a “walk” around Cherry Creek State Park. After living in a truck for twenty years eating truck stop food, I was 80 pounds heavier than I am today and had to keep stopping to catch my breath.

The reason she was first attracted to me (she told me after I had started getting back into better shape) was because of what I had told her that I thought about a story she had written and given to me to read.

I thought it was great! I went on and on about it during our first dinner date.

She took me to a Japanese restaurant, very unlike any of my favorite on-the-road diners down south, biscuits and gravy for lunch.

She ordered for me, something with lots of noodles and no raw fish. She had a glass of wine. I had a can of beer.

Pulling the printed pages of her story out of my pants pocket, I said, “It’s great! Effing great!”

She said others she’d met said things like, "Nice,“ or "I like it,” or “Interesting,” or said nothing at all. But I thought it was great, and I told her so.

It was grammatically pristine; it moved across the pages like a story on a drive-in movie screen; I clearly got the lay of the land; unfamiliar territory, but I always knew where I was. On her dating site profile she’d mentioned that she was a writer; not just that she liked to write stuff and had a story to tell, but that she was. Lots of things on an internet dating site turn out to be not true. But she was, all right! A real writer. I could see it in her prose.

Her story was set in Europe. It’s 1970. The first post-WWII generation is coming of age, going out into the world, Freebirds, miniskirts, backpacks, tattered jeans. I identified.

It was about two young college-age girls hitchhiking across the Alps to get from Italy to the French coast and then down into Spain. It’s an adventure story with not-so-subtle brushstrokes of the passions of youth and doubts.

Stopped for supplies approaching Paris, one of the girls — the American girl — notices headlines on the front page of a copy of that day’s International Herald Tribune… NIXON ORDERS TROOPS INTO CAMBODIA… GUARDS FIRE ON STUDENT PROTESTERS AT KENT STATE, FOUR DEAD.

She wonders if she’ll ever be able to go back… to where she’d come from; where was her home? Where did she belong? Maybe one day she’d settle down. But something somehow made her first need to see it all.

Because I’m a writer I know that writers can only write about what they know. So, of course, that was her, there, in the story, the one sitting across the table from me now, fifty years later… the unfolding story… the American girl had gone back to America; got her PhD at the University of Oregon and taught at universities from Guam in the western Pacific to upstate New York and wound up marrying me, author of Buddhist Trucker, from ‘da U.P..

“Oh, ya, now I remember,” I said. “We’re married. Imagine that.”

Then I had what I thought was a brilliant idea. “How ‘bout in this week’s Thursday’s Columns we run that story you showed me when we first met, you know, the one about the two girls hitchhiking across Europe?”

"Ok," she said. "But you'll probably forget."

--30--

To Nice

by

Culley Jane Carson

It was the most perfect day you could imagine.

I had the feeling I was imagining it, although it might have been Katie.

From what I had seen of her, Katie didn’t seem like the kind of person who had that much imagination, but then again, if my imagination had been powerful enough to produce a day like that, with sunshine pouring over every clean, sharp detail, I might not have let on either, who knows?

There were just enough cloud puffs to enhance the deep Mediterranean blue of the sky. The temperature was so unseasonably warm we both put away our sweatshirts. We walked out to the autostrada at the edge of the city, pausing frequently to rest and lean our backpacks against a wall. We were standing next to the road by about ten o’clock, facing a torrent of little Italian cars escaping the city on this mild morning in early May.

At first it was pleasant enough. We smiled and held out our arms over and over, waved back when they signaled to us, chatted with each other to keep ourselves in a good mood so we could smile and hold out our arms again. After about an hour we began to lose our good humor. The sun was just as bright, the cars were just as small, just as numerous, and not one of them had stopped.

We had reached the point of asking each other how far it might be to walk to the train station when a bright red convertible with the top down slowed and pulled over. The driver had silvery hair, he was trim and tan, and he smiled at Katie as he said in unmistakably American English, “Where are you going? I’m not sure if there’s room for both of you.”

“We’re going to France,” said Katie, looking over the tiny vehicle. It was perfectly obvious that there was not enough room for both of us. But we were desperate.

“Maybe if we put our backpacks in the trunk?” I suggested.

“There isn’t any trunk,” he said. He got out and stood next to us as we tried wedging both packs in the footspace for the passenger’s seat. Then Katie climbed into the seat, propping her legs on top of the packs, while I crawled into the back, not really a seat at all, but simply a space I could occupy only in an uncomfortably sideways reclining position.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked.

The sunlight was turning hard-edged; the car was ridiculously red. “Sure. How far are you going?” I inquired.

“I may make it to Nice by this evening, I’m not sure. Actually I’m headed now for a little town in the mountains where they make spaghetti. Want to come along?”

It occurred to me the man might be gay, but he seemed happy enough looking at and chatting with Katie as we drove along. He told us he was a freelance journalist living in Rome. He had an assignment to write about a spaghetti factory where the family had kept a museum of old utensils, photos and bits of things that might have historical significance. I relaxed and let Katie entertain him while I admired the rising ground, the tile-roofed houses stepping up the hillside and the brown dry fields just short of spring. The wind was in my hair, and I listened off and on to Katie being charming. It was a tiny bit irritating the way people were always busy liking Katie. She wasn’t quite beautiful—her face was a little too long. But I had listened to two guys in a youth hostel openly discussing me in French, evidently under the impression that I didn’t understand: “Elle n’est pas vraiment moche (she’s not exactly ugly), mais l’autre a un petit quelque chose... (but the other one has a little extra something... )”

I didn’t know what the “little extra something” was except that Katie was something of a bitch when there weren’t any men around to charm. She thought it was rude not to answer when perfect strangers greeted her, so we always had a string of unsavory characters following us around. We could hardly step outside without accumulating them; they seemed to be drawn like wasps to Katie’s red t-shirt. She did have fairly big breasts. I suspected that was the petit quelque chose those guys were talking about. Even though I was the older of the two, I was sometimes mistaken for the baby sister because of my wide innocent green eyes. One chubby driver who picked us up had asked us repeatedly how old we were before making his proposition. My Italian was limited, so it took me a while to understand. Finally, he rubbed his forefingers together suggestively and said, “Fica-fica.” Because at that point we appeared to comprehend what he was getting at, he repeated the expression with satisfaction. “Fica-fica Catty? Fica-fica Giovanna? No fica-fica?” With gestures he made it clear that he would take us 50 kilometers out of his way if we would fica-fica. Since I was translating everything as best I could, he must have gotten the impression that we were hesitating or even negotiating. Fifty kilometers was his best offer, and soon we found ourselves beside the road at a little-used autostrada exit. We ended up having to hitchhike back to Milan and start over.

Katie and I had met in the youth hostel in Geneva. She had just spent a year at some Swiss boarding school supposedly polishing her French. She had some time to kill before her mother flew over to pick her up, so she was thinking she might make it to Ibiza, where, she told me, you could live on less than a dollar a day if you teamed up with like-minded American and Canadian youths hanging out on the beach. I had finished college in the middle of January, and I was fleeing the hard decisions about my future in a country at war. It was 1970. I had bought a one-way plane ticket to Luxembourg, and I figured I would try to find work when my money ran out. I had three hundred dollars in my pocket.

It was the day after the fica-fica fiasco that we took up with the man in the red car. We drove up into the mountains, and when we arrived in the spaghetti factory town, he offered to buy us lunch. He wasn’t expected at the museum until afternoon; we would pass the time pleasantly at a cafe with little, white-covered tables outside. He ordered the meal. “Salad, of course,” he said, without consulting us. “It’s amazing, they expect you to start off a whole meal with a plate of spaghetti.” He settled back with satisfaction as the salad appeared.

Katie looked splendid in the sunlight. She was wearing her black outfit: a black long-sleeved turtleneck and black corduroy jeans that set off her ash blond curls and gray eyes. She didn’t quite flirt with him, managing to appear luminescent and youthful in a way that probably made him feel rejuvenated himself. I began eating the salad, pale green leaves covered with tiny black spots and slick with transparent dressing. We folded the shiny leaves on our forks and stuffed them into our mouths, where they crunched down to nothing and slid comfortably down our throats.

The conversation was general. We didn’t talk politics. Katie and I had exchanged views on the war; it was one of the things we agreed on. As a Canadian, she saw things in a somewhat different light—her country had no troops in Vietnam, and the boyfriend waiting for her at home was not worried about being drafted—but our visceral opposition was the same. Most of the people we met felt as we did.

I glanced down at the salad again, then examined it more closely. The dark spots had multiple itsy-bitsy legs splayed out around them. They were bugs. After a moment’s hesitation, I pointed this out to the others. They completely ignored me as if I had made an enormous blunder and continued eating without comment as I watched in fascination. Then the fish was served.

After the meal, our host smoked a cigarette with his coffee. Finally looking at his watch, he said we had better be going. “The old goat!” whispered Katie when we went to the toilet. “He seems to have a lot of trouble changing gears. I can’t believe how much time he spends feeling my leg.”

A bit farther up the mountain, we stopped at one of a line of houses fronting on the steep cobbled street. The door was opened for us by a woman dressed in black, her gray hair neatly pinned up. She called an elderly man who took us next door to the house containing the museum, unlocked it and ushered us in. The museum occupied three or four small rooms upstairs. The walls were covered with framed photographs—group pictures of spaghetti makers lined up like football teams, pictures of machinery we didn’t understand and weren’t sure was even still in use. While our driver interviewed the old man in Italian, taking notes, Katie and I looked around, moving through it quickly to keep out of the way. Then we waited in the hall, looking out the window.

The journalist finished his interview, got out his camera and started taking pictures. “Uh, say!” he called to us. “Would anyone like to be in a picture or two?” Katie and I exchanged a smile. He had obviously forgotten our names. He stuck his head into the hallway. “How about it?” he asked Katie. She followed him into the room, where he began posing her next to the photographs or bent over display cases.

Eventually he put away his camera, thanked the spaghetti people and we all packed ourselves into his car again. I pretended not to hear Katie’s offer to trade places; I could see no one was interested in fumbling with my leg.

I noticed with surprise that my hands were slightly sunburned. I closed my eyes and relaxed behind warm eyelids.

After crossing into France we stopped in a small seaside town so the driver could buy cigarettes. Katie and I got out to stretch our legs and breathe the marine air, lounging against the car. The man came back with a newspaper which he stashed under the driver’s seat. “They didn’t have my brand,” he told us. “I’ll have to try down the street.” He disappeared again, and I reached into the car for the paper. “Let’s find out what’s going on in the world.” I spread the International Herald Tribune across the seat. The headlines hit us like physical blows.

NIXON ORDERS TROOPS INTO CAMBODIA

GUARDS FIRE ON STUDENT PROTESTERS

AT KENT STATE, FOUR DEAD

There seemed to be more news than a single paper could hold. Katie and I pored over the page, holding our breaths as we tried to grasp what was going on in that distant place we hadn’t thought about a single time since leaving Milan that morning.

The man returned with his cigarettes. “Oh, you found it,” he said. “I tried to hide it from you. I didn’t want to spoil your day.” The sun was getting low. “We still might make it to Nice tonight if we hurry,” he said consolingly. “Let’s go.”

None of us talked as we drove along the coast of France, the sun sinking quietly into a serene sea. My hair was a mess, as was Katie’s, all windblown and tangled. We felt dirty and disreputable. I for one was shocked and saddened to realize that, having sought refuge almost as far as was physically and emotionally possible from the largest moral issue I had ever faced, it had nevertheless found me out and fastened its claws in me, to the point I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to go back.

When we finally approached Nice, it glittered against the night sky. It was the end of a perfect day.