Chapter Two
“Mike, are we ready?” Rodger’s question brought Mike to life. The boy’s job on trips was to check for anything left undone. Rodger was somewhat obsessed with his car, a Super Sport model despite the six cylinders. A four-on-the-floor transmission, taut suspension, and better tires marked it off from ordinary Chevelles. Rodger did his own maintenance and loved to describe the car’s operation to his son.
Mike ran through the house shutting windows and turning off lights. The bags were by the door, and he started lugging them outside. Rodger paid, navigated, and drove on their trips—Mike did most everything else.
After Veronica’s departure, Rodger took Mike wherever he went. They had visited, in addition to many Kansas locales, Hot Springs, Arkansas, The Lake of the Ozarks, and the Colorado Rockies. The trips hardly filled the gap left by his mom’s absence, but it gave Mike a sense of the world beyond Hutchinson, which helped.
Once in his accustomed spot, the front passenger seat, Mike focused for the first time on their destination. California was still a place of refuge in 1969. Less than a decade before Rodger’s birth, thousands of Dust Bowl refugees had travelled to the state. Rodger knew an old tune, “California Here I Come,” which he would sing at times. Adding retrospective significance to this habit, Veronica then moved there. In proportions he could not possibly understand, such experiences caused Mike to view California unquestionably as the “Golden State.”
Veronica had first visited California after her estrangement from Rodger. She let him know that she would travel with her Wichita State sociology seminar. It would only be for a week, she said, but she wanted to tell Mike goodbye.
Rodger drove Mike to Wichita Municipal Airport in early 1967. Mike was glad to see Veronica, but he was confused by the tension between his parents. His mother had simply left home, and Mike had not yet witnessed conflict between them. Rodger was restrained, and Veronica barely acknowledged her husband. She told Rodger her class was examining the hippie counterculture in San Francisco. Rodger understood little more of this than did Mike. Their last view of Veronica was of her walking with other students and their professor across the tarmac to a waiting DC-10. She clutched her skirt in the wind, briefly waived, and climbed into the plane.
In the fall of 1967, Rodger received a postcard from Veronica. She was now enrolled at the University of San Francisco, she said, because it was a Catholic university. She wanted to study the Church’s oppression of women. Her signature concluded the message.
In the spring of 1969, Veronica called. The call was collect, and Rodger hesitated for half a minute before accepting charges. Even long distance, Rodger could hear a profound change in his wife’s voice. They had grown up outside, as children did in those days, and Veronica had always spoken with a clear, confident note.
The voice Rodger heard was neither of these. Veronica had a rasp and sounded out of breath. She first asked about Mike, and after Rodger had responded with details of their son’s school and baseball team, Veronica asked Rodger about himself.
Rodger felt his usual inarticulateness step forward. It occupied his field of vision, and as always, he could see no way around. Rodger responded with a few generalities about work and then asked Veronica, with some curiosity but mostly to change the subject: “How are you?”
“I’m in L.A. now.”
“Oh?”
“I finished my masters, and I started a Ph.D. at U.C.L.A.”
“O.K.”
“Things haven’t gone so well.”
“They haven’t?”
“Housing was real expensive, and I moved in with some people.”
Rodger grew tense. After a while he asked, knowing the risk he was running:
“What people?”
“Just some other students. We had a place in the canyon.”
This meant nothing to Rodger. He was glad of it, too. Not wanting to know more, he changed the subject:
“What’s happening now?”
“I dropped out. The scene was too competitive, too patriarchal. I think I want to teach, but I don’t know . . . .”
As her voice trailed off, Rodger let it go and sat silently. His silent spells had been a feature of their relationship from the beginning. Rodger’s silence was okay in high school, when they were usually out with friends, and in early marriage he had grown quite comfortable with it, allowing his wife to talk and make plans. Rodger almost felt a return to those days now, but Veronica was very far away.
Veronica also felt the return. She had noticed Rodger’s taciturn nature early, of course, but it did not seem unusual. Some of the best men she knew were like that. She even thought it was cute, and Rodger never mocked her volubility, as did other boys. Veronica developed a vision of married life based on an anticipated freedom—she could provide the content of the marriage, and Rodger would provide the stability. It seemed like it would work.
After Mike was born, however, there was little freedom. And Mike was not nearly so taciturn as Rodger. Veronica wanted to share all this with her husband, and although he would hear her out, there was little he could say. All was what he expected.
Classes had offered Veronica an escape. Men were there who could talk, and women who talked about something other than children. Home began to mean obligation and toil, and more children would only cement the deal. Veronica had learned that a person who cannot respond cannot really listen.
But this now seemed far away to her, as far as she seemed to Rodger. Veronica’s sociological theories dissipated as she sat on the phone with the person to whom she had been most personally committed. “I’m in trouble, Rodger.” “I’ll be out,” he said. Ten days later Rodger climbed into the front seat next to Mike and pointed the Chevelle’s headlights west on U.S. 50.