“Want to do a date night?”
“Um?” I said, “Sure.”
Don and I had successfully navigated almost a full week of wedded bliss, performing important marital tasks such as joining a savings account, folding a tiny bit of laundry, and thinking really (really) hard about writing thank you notes. A date night seemed an appropriate reward for our labors.
“Where do you want to go?” I asked.
“How about a dive bar Mexican joint in the middle of nowhere?”
“Um,” I said, “Sure?”
And off we whisked to Carl’s Hide-A-Way on Lewis St. in the heretofore undiscovered (at least to Sarah) country of Ida, Michigan. Carl’s Hide-A-Way had a door labeled “Puerta” and a hand-painted sign with saguaro cactuses sternly warning patrons that parking was for Carl’s “ONLY.” Beneath it, a second sign had been added, declaring the lot for The Rusty Cup coffee shop “ALSO.” I told Don to leave the headlights on and went to snap a picture.
Inside there were plenty of booths, a pool table, and a whiteboard with orange and black ghosts heralding the return of the “pumpkin spice cheesecake burrito.”
“Look,” I said, pointing.
“Hmm,” he said.
We teetered on the precipice of pumpkin-Mex fusion for a second, then retreated to the safety of Combo Plate # 1 (him) and a steak quesadilla (me). The steak was excellent. We joked with the waitress and mourned the lack of quarters for pool. It was a good night, about to get better.
Out in the disputed territory of the parking lot, I looked up and saw a sky so moon-bright it seemed the sun had not set, but merely dimmed himself to his lowest setting. The whole canopy glowed a deep, midnight blue, and white, backlit clouds shifted into and away from each other. I stared for a long while, imagining the clouds as puzzle pieces, or, better, as continents in a state of drift.
Don suggested we walk, and so we walked on a fall night which had pulled herself away from summer, but only just, which still had on her skin the warmth of his embrace. The streets, mostly deserted, were faced by rows of dark houses, broken occasionally by the most ostentatious Halloween displays. In one yard, ten foot skeletons stared down at a makeshift graveyard while a neon “NO Vacancy” sign flickered behind them in a black window. In another a spider had grown almost to the size of a small tree. Ghouls with glowing red eyes followed our progress, and hands of the buried undead thrust themselves out of garden beds laid to rest for winter.
You felt — I felt — some odd admixture of things: a frisson of fear skimming the surface of delight, the sense that the streets, as they turned at right angles into other darknesses, were, really, undiscovered country.
They were, really, (to Sarah) undiscovered country. Here was the house of the doctor where Don and his friends played basketball. Here was the church he used to go to, and here the cornerstone they’d pulled out to find a time capsule from a congregation a hundred years before. There was more — a youth not mine unfolding itself, revealing itself beneath the light of an autumn moon.
At the car again, I looked up. The clouds had gone. Only the midnight blue of an empty sky remained, like the blank spaces on a map when what is known has ended and all that remains (and beckons) is wild country.
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