We’re all sun-bleached blondes who load our kids into shiny SUVs and cart them off to surf camp. Everyone in California lives in L.A., after all. Instead I handed it over, the driver’s license that expired on my next birthday: my tentative smile, the vital statistics I had improved upon slightly, adding an inch, subtracting ten pounds.Ĭalifornia, huh? he said. I’d been about to throw myself on the mercy of the Wisconsin justice system, which had never impressed me. In the midst of my rambling, my right hand brushed against the ID carrier still looped around my neck. But my flight got in late, and I was anxious to get going and there’s almost no one on the road. I started babbling away like a psychotic on a weekend pass. A dozen pens, the wad of Kleenex I’d cried into on the plane, a Life Saver clinging to a bit of aluminum foil-but no license. To speed up the search, I turned my shoulder bag upside down.
Credit cards, my Berkeley ID, a Starbucks gift card with a grand balance of fifty-seven cents. I dug in my shoulder bag for my wallet, where an empty space gaped at me from behind a plastic window. I suddenly worried that with this, like most things in my life, I hadn’t taken the time to read the small print, to look for loopholes. He scrutinized the contract with his flashlight, more carefully than I’d studied it at the airport with a line of twenty people shifting behind me. It could have been anyone’s signature, really. I just rented this car at the airport, I said, producing the plastic pouch from Hertz, full of shiny brochures and a contract that unfolded like a fan to reveal my sleep-deprived scrawl at the bottom. I peered out the window at him, but his face was hidden in a pocket of darkness, only his badge winking back at me, his stiff jacket collar standing at attention. License and registration, said the cop, an automaton. It was as if I had spent years walking on a treadmill and was just now finding my real footing. The night was cold-was it really almost winter in the Midwest? I had been living in a mild haze of seasonless fog, and this chill nipped straight through my T-shirt. I know, I was speeding, I said, even before the window came to a stop.
While I searched for the power window button, I caught a glimpse of myself in the glass: wrinkled clothes, grease forming at my hairline, mascara from twelve hours ago smudged under my eyes like twin bruises. I had packed in a hurry-my cell phone, a tube of lip gloss, a stack of undergrad papers to be graded, a dog-eared copy of US Weekly.
Just outside Milwaukee, I saw the lights behind me-Wisconsin Highway Patrol-and pulled over to the shoulder.Įven before the cop tapped on the window, I started fumbling in the shoulder bag I had been lugging around since that morning, since San Francisco.
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