Road Worrier, or a pre-Xmas-no-Xmas X-country adventure
Either you know what a Delorean is or you don’t.
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We’re sitting down for breakfast when the poet’s mom texts to tell him that his dad fainted earlier that morning.
It’s the second time in as many days. And since his dad has also survived a heart attack in recent years, no one is taking it lightly.
The poet tries to call but his mom doesn’t pick up. He hits redial again and again. Finally, when the call goes through, she’s talking and sobbing at the same time. His face falls and everything goes still and I rush over and hold his hand. I think about when my ex-husband’s father got sick and never got better. When my own dad went into the hospital with a heart attack and I was a 24-hour flight away from home. I think about how when someone becomes your people, it gives you even more people to lose.
The poet hangs up, and tearfully translates that his father has gone into hospital.
“I want to drive there today,” he says.
“Of course,” I say.
“There”, his hometown, is 11 hours away—it’s called Zonguldak, a name my friend Jasmine says sounds like something out Harry Potter. We throw clothes and dog food into bags and get into our new-to-us car, Desmond, a grey Hyundai Getz we named after the Beatles’ song.
This is my first time driving through this part of the interior of the country. We go through small farming villages, one after another, hugged by arid hills, cows and goats grazing, mountains towering in the distance. We pass a thousand stalls on the side of the road, covered in tarps and slapped-together panelling, with hand-painted signs advertising oranges, tea, corn on the cob. We stop to get oranges and potatoes and honey. I spot an impressive selection of village pants.
Most of the roadside restaurants are closed, having done their duty of catering to the summer road trippers on their way in and out of the cities. We find an open one that’s made to look like a yurt, and they bring us lamb that’s cooked on a little mini-grill they put on your table, and crusty bread which I eat with abandon because fuck it. It’s colder inside than it is outside, and while the poet taps out work messages on his phone, I listen to the occupants of the only other table: two men, having a loud, business-dealy-sounding conversation and scribbling things onto a pad. Django growls at them intermittently. A little boy lies on a couch next to a wood stove, absorbed in videos on a phone.
Back on the road, the poet gets on another work call, promising that it’s the last of the day. It isn’t. In passive-aggressive protest I stomp inside a gas station and buy two bags of Haribo and a bag of what appear to be Turkish Bits and Bites. I’ve been homesick lately, getting full-body pangs at songs from my high school years and piles of orange leaves and even Christmas instagram posts. I chomp loudly while he talks, reminding myself that this is his job, and also his dad is sick, and the also the world probably doesn’t revolve around me, even if I sometimes secretly think it should.
Finally, the phone call ends.
He digs into my snacks and we start playing road trip games, which I found on the internet in an article enticingly named “Freaking Amazing Road Trip Games for Couples". Two Truths and a Lie. Categories. Naming plots from movies. Who thought these up? Either you know what a Delorean is or you don’t.
The poet’s mom calls and reports that his dad has been given the okay to go home from the hospital. He’ll go back tomorrow for more tests, but the doctors don’t see anything to be concerned about. Immensely cheered, we drive on.
We stop to use the restroom at a place that specializes in local confectionary and rosewater beauty products. There’s a fluffy puppy tied up outside, and she and Django fall in love, and it’s so cold and the ground is wet and the string someone is using as a leash is wrapped around a tree. I envision grabbing her, leaping into Desmond and zooming off. A shop employee races over and hands me a plate of what looks like sushi rolls made out of marshmallow and covered with shredded coconut.
I instinctively want to say thank you but no, but that would be the height of rudeness in this country. So I smile and eat it and then the shop owner comes over and offers me a different kind of sweet, and then a slice of fried Turkish sausage, perhaps to assuage the diabetic coma he sees forming in my eyes. He plays with Django and tells us that it’s his puppy outside, and he can’t bring her in because a lot of customers don’t like dogs. I feel slightly better about not having stolen her.
The poet buys sweets for his parents and his brother and Zehra, whose house we’ll be sleeping at tonight before we drive the final 3 hours tomorrow morning.
We drive on.
We take a shortcut over a mountain, a winding road with hairpin turns that would be awesome to drive in a new car and also in daylight. We talk about what a good relationship means to us: lots of communication, we agree, and respect. This last one comment is perhaps because I am getting carsick and marshmallow-sushi-induced hot flashes and have a sore ass, and keep saying, “Can you please. Drive. More slowly.”
Desmond’s left turning signal goes on the fritz.
We arrive at the poet’s brother’s at 1am, tiptoeing across the heated floors and through the kitchen, which is so spotless and modern that would not be out of place in a spaceship. The poet collapses fully clothed into bed, while I wash my face and brush my teeth and change into my sleepwear, which smells damp from being inside our house, which could double as the interior of a submarine.
Django refuses to eat or drink. I lie awake half the night, worrying. Then morning comes and he dives into his food and water face-first.
Despite our best intentions, we don’t leave until after 11. At my insistence, we stop at Starbucks. The serve us with red Christmas cups, which, at a side-of-the-road strip mall that has a mosque in it, is so bizarre and capitalistically familiar that it lifts my spirits. I chat away about how much it this reminds me of holiday time at home: pulling off the highway for a yuletide-themed coffee on the way to see family.
Except I never really liked the holidays that much, I admit.
“Why not?” the poet asks. His only experiences of Christmas, aside from in movies, was when he lived in Australia, where people wear Santa hats with flip flops and shorts and he celebrated by getting drunk with his housemates.
I tell him about my brother and me shuttling between our parents’ houses on Christmas day. How stressed out my mother would get—like so many people—trying to make everything perfect for this one day, feeling pressured to spend money and cook insane recipes when all anyone really wants to do is like on the couch eating chocolate tree decorations and watching TV.
“Why do people get so worried about Christmas?” he asks.
I could offer a hundred answers for this, but I’d rather not think about them.
I text Zehra. I tell her how weird it feels that I won’t be seeing her in a couple of weeks, because that’s what I’m used to in December: that knowing I’ll probably see most of the people I love. She replies that they’re driving up to Zonguldak on Friday. Now even happier, I place possibly the most privileged western woman order in history: a soy cappuccino and a gluten-free brownie.
We climb into Desmond, put Michael Buble’s Christmas album on the stereo, crank up the volume, and drive on.