The Rolled-Up Rug

Janet here, and I'll tell you about the drive that changed how Anders and I do things. I was twenty-three that spring, he was twenty-six, and we'd been married two years. He was picking up moving jobs off the base boards and I was cleaning the bunkhouses out at the Red Bluff rodeo grounds, and somewhere in there we'd gotten comfortable. Too comfortable, if you want the truth. Dinner, TV, bed. Tuesday was Tuesday was Tuesday.

So when he borrowed his boss's cargo van for a furniture run out to Utah, a long high-desert haul with nothing in the back but a rolled-up rug and a few duffels, I saw my chance. I even planned it, which is not like me. I bought a lace bralette at the discount store two weeks before and hid it in my duffel the way you hide cigarettes from your mother. Well, like a grown woman hiding a bralette, which is somehow more embarrassing.

We pulled out of the lot at seven in the morning on a Friday, sun already climbing, and I reached up to adjust the rearview mirror. That's when I caught him grinning at me in it. Just grinning, big and dumb, like he knew something.

"What?" I asked, even though I knew what.

"Nothing," he said, all innocent, and turned the wheel to take us out past the stock pens.

"You've got a face on you, Anders Holm. I can see it right there in the mirror."

"I've just got a good feeling about this trip," he said. "That's all. Good feeling."

And I felt my face go hot, because he didn't know yet. He didn't know about the bralette or the game I'd been cooking up in my head all week while I scrubbed showers at the rodeo grounds. But he was about to. I'd rehearsed it in the shower and everything, and still my hands shook a little when I said it.

"Pull in here," I told him, pointing at the gas station just outside the grounds. The one with the broken air pump and the cat that sleeps on the ice machine.

"Tank's full."

"I know it's full. Pull in anyway."

He gave me a look but he pulled in. He killed the engine and turned to face me, and that's when I unzipped my coveralls. All the way down. Underneath I had on the lace bralette, red, the good kind with the little scalloped edge, and nothing fancy below because I hadn't gone completely insane, just mostly insane.

His mouth fell open. Actually fell open, like in a cartoon.

"Janet! What in the hell are you wearing?"

"A bralette. Do you like it? I bought it special."

"I can see that. I can very much see that." He kept glancing out the windshield at the gas station windows, like somebody might walk up, and honestly that was part of the fun. "We are parked, in broad daylight, thirty feet from a cash register."

"I know! Isn't it great?" I laughed, and zipped it back up to my collarbone just to watch him suffer. "Here's the thing. Here's my idea. Every hour we're on the road, I do something bold. Something that makes me feel daring. Something maybe a little bit watched, even if it's just you watching."

He was quiet a second, and I got scared he'd say no, that he'd say we were married people now and married people don't play games in borrowed vans. Two years of comfort will put that fear in you. Then he said, "Every hour."

"Every hour."

"And who decides if a thing counts as bold?"

"I do. It's my game." I stuck my chin out at him. "You can say no to any single thing, of course. But the game goes on."

"Deal," he said, too fast, and we both cracked up, and he pulled back onto the highway with his ears red all the way to the tips.

I waited a while. I made him sweat through Cleve Creek and up the long grade, just chatting about nothing, the furniture client, whether Utah had good diners. Then at the top of the grade I said, "Hour one," and I climbed over the seats into the back before he could ask what I was up to.

"What are you doing back there?"

"Playing my hour," I said.

The rug was rolled up tight, a big red thing one of his clients had offloaded on him for hauling. I grabbed the end of it and dragged it out across the plywood floor, unrolled it maybe halfway, a wide soft runway from the doors to the wheel well. Then I lay down on it. Just lay right down, flat on my back on that dusty red pile, and propped my boots up against the side wall of the van so my legs made a big wide V he could see in the mirror.

"Janet," he said, and his voice had gone all gravel. "I can see you in the mirror."

"I know you can. That's the whole point." I ran my hands up my thighs, slow, over the coveralls, and watched his eyes in the mirror while I did it. His eyes kept jumping between the road and the mirror, road, mirror, road, mirror. "Drive safe, honey. We've got a lot of hours between here and Utah."

"You're going to kill me on this highway."

"I've barely started! This is hour one. Hour one is just the warm-up." I giggled, I couldn't help it, it came bubbling out of me like I was a different woman than the one who bleaches bunkhouse toilets. Maybe I was, for that morning. "Unzip me?"

He reached back one hand at the next stop sign and I guided it to my zipper, and he pulled it down slow to my belly, and the desert air came in through the cab and moved across my skin and I thought, yes, this, this is what I've been missing. Not the man. I had the man. The daring. The being seen.

"Red bralette again," he said, peeking back. "It's even better from behind."

"It's from the discount store."

"Don't care. Best twenty-two dollars you ever spent."

"Twenty-two," I said, and he laughed so hard the van drifted onto the shoulder and I sat up cackling, and we had to pull over for a minute because neither of us could breathe.

So there I was, an hour into my own game, lying on a stranger's rug in the back of a borrowed van with my coveralls open and my husband's eyes on me every time the road went straight. And here is what surprised me. It wasn't enough. It was good, it was real good, but every time a truck blew past and the van rocked in its wake, I felt this little jolt and this little thought, and the thought was, what if they could see? What if somebody looked in?

I didn't say it yet. I filed it away.

We stopped for lunch at a truck stop past the midpoint of the desert, and that's where the plan went from a game to a real thing. But that part comes later. This part, the morning part, I want to get right, because it was the part where I stopped being the Janet who married at twenty-one and felt like she'd skipped a whole chapter of her life. I lay on that rug and I looked at the ceiling of the van and I thought, twenty-three years old is not too late to be somebody new. Twenty-three is not late for anything.

"You've got that face again," Anders called back.

"What face?"

"The one where you're planning something."

"Maybe I am. Maybe a wife is allowed to plan things."

"God help me," he said, but he was grinning again, and in the mirror I watched his eyes flick back to me where I lay with my boots up the wall, and I wiggled my hips at him, and he blew the horn at nothing at all, just from being happy. That's my husband. Best man I know.

The rug smelled like somebody else's house, dust and lavender and old coffee, and I liked that too, the not-mine-ness of it, like being a guest at my own life.

"Next hour," I said, "is going to be interesting."

"Interesting how?"

"You'll see when we get there."

"Get where, Janet?"

"Whatever's next," I said, and stretched out flatter on the rug, and closed my eyes, and let the highway hum through the floor into my spine, and smiled to myself the whole way.

Two hours past lunch the road climbed again, and Anders pointed at a brown sign that said SCENIC OVERLOOK, 1 MILE, and looked at me in the mirror with his eyebrows way up. "This is it, isn't it? This is whatever's next."

"Maybe. Pull in and find out."

The overlook sat on a shoulder of rock with the whole desert laid out below it, brown and gold and going on forever, with one road cutting through it like a scar. One other vehicle there, a big rig parked at the far end with its engine idling. A trucker standing by his cab drinking coffee.

Anders cut the engine and turned around in his seat. "Okay, wife. What's the plan?"

"Come back here and sit with me. Bring your jacket."

He climbed over the seat and sat on the duffels, and I crawled up next to him and kissed him, which I hadn't done all morning, funny how the game had made me forget the plain old part. He tasted like root beer from the truck stop. "Hi," he said against my mouth.

"Hi yourself. Now here's the plan. See that trucker over there?"

"The guy drinking coffee?"

"That's the one. He's going to walk past the van in a minute, going back to his rig. And when he does, I'm going to be pressed up against this window. With my coveralls open."

Anders went still for a second, and then he said, "Janet. He'll see you. Like, actually see you."

"That's the idea, silly. That is the entire game. Being seen. You knew that when you married me, you just didn't know it yet."