The Mother of All Trips, Chapter 7: Texas Wants You Anyway

The Mother of All Trips:13 Months, 8 Stops, 1 Toddler

Chapter 7: “Texas Wants You Anyway”

By Mara Gorman

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivative Works 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visithttp://motherofalltrips.blogspot.com/ ; or, (b) send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 2ndStreet, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.Copyright ©2008 Mara Gorman

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I sipped coffee from a large ceramic mug and leaned against vibrant fuchsia silk throw pillows. How were we ever going to keep the ivory cotton that covered the sofacushions (à la Shabby Chic) clean? I wondered idly. I wouldn’t trust

myself

with a whitecouch, let alone Tommy, who at 8 a.m. was busily burrowing in mulch in the well-fencedbackyard.It was January third, our first full day in Austin, and it was 80 degrees. Everythingfrom the towels to my clothes felt unpleasantly moist. I had none of my usual militaryzeal to immediately unpack and organize our possessions, despite the fact that this was arelatively small task because we had shipped eight boxes of stuff that were yet to arrive.If Tommy hadn’t been there to wake me and Matt before six, I most likely would haveremained in the unfamiliar bed with its swampy sheets and wrought-iron headboard thatbanged against the wall every time one of us moved.Neither Matt nor I had ever been to Texas, which isn’t to say that we didn’t havestrong opinions about it. I, in particular, had a laundry list of Yankee prejudices. In myown defense, I was raised by people who believed that New England is the geographic,spiritual, and cultural center of the universe, or at least of the United States. My motherwas particularly bad; I’m not sure that she ever remembered whether Matt grew up inWisconsin or Minnesota, or whether she even truly believed that these states weredistinct.Marrying a Midwesterner had of course changed my perspective, especially aftermany visits, but the farthest south I had ever made it in the middle of the country wasKansas City, where my best friend lived. Texas was as remote to me as Mars and if youhad asked me to picture the landscape, the only image I would have been able to provide

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was a desert of cacti and cliffs perhaps taken from old Roadrunner cartoons. And myother impressions were no less stereotypical—ranches and rattlesnakes, talk aboutremembering the Alamo and not messing with Texas, and oil millionaires who worecowboy hats and spurs and holsters (like James Dean in

Giant

).Texas was less familiar to me than England or Italy, and even though we coulddrive there, seemed farther away. In fact, it was the act of driving to Austin—which took us two days from Kansas City where we had stopped en route from Wisconsin—thatmade it seem all the more distant. As we drove from Dallas to Austin, the vastness of thesky added to my sense of dislocation. The road stretched out, unimaginably long and flat,except around the cities where the multilevel highways with long sculptural ramps curledsinuously around one another, soaring heavenward. Austin might well have been the onlycity on the planet. There was no way to orient ourselves. We were on our own.And I felt like it that first morning as I got up and wandered around the modestbungalow, examining the dining table with its crackled top and sage-green legs, thegilded icons of the Madonna, the art and design books stacked stylishly on the floor, andfour heavy, ornate, wooden picture frames, placed one inside the other and leaned upagainst the ruby surface of the wall. It was immediately obvious that the childless couplewe rented from had selected their belongings during long Sunday afternoons in antiqueand thrift stores where they purchased retro-chic items to set up in tableaux copied fromdesign magazines.The effect of the furnishings and the wall colorings—some walls a pale acidgreen, others a deep cranberry—was far more funky and hip than any I would everachieve in my own home. Normally I would have enjoyed the chance to pretend that I