At the DMV the other day, side-by-side at computer testing stations and competing for points on our driver’s exams, T. finally beat me, and by a point more than he had the last time.
“You didn’t miss the question about the blind in a crosswalk again did you?” he asked as we dug out our passports and utility bills, ready to pose for our pictures.
“Worse. I missed the one about a red, octagonal sign.” It’s test anxiety, I’ve become certain. I suffer from it only at DMVs, though luckily, in the four states in which I’ve lived over the last decade, I’ve always passed.
We each took our turn sitting and grinning, accepting our new state ID’s, relinquishing our old. It wasn’t until we’d been living here in Illiana a month or so that I began to realize how entwined is the story of T. and me with moving; how, if chronicled, our relationship would be a road-trip novel and not a sit-com because there’s no set. Perhaps it was this second major move of ours that showed me: we were good at loading a van, forwarding our mail, plotting a route with the atlas. We were too good, knowing tips and tricks: getting copies of medical records, taping the screws for the futon frame to the futon frame.
We’d first met as transplants, expats, the stories of each of our lives—short as they’d been at that point—parallel stories of moving from small towns in the Midwest to colleges in the Midwest, and then to graduate school even further away. Of course that’s a common story: to grow up is to move on, and to go to college is to go away, maybe especially in the Midwest where success is measured in distance traveled from home. But just because it’s as old as Sister Carrie doesn’t mean it isn’t formative.
Nor is the territory we’ve now covered as a young couple, even unmarried, unusual for our generation: many of our friends shed addresses annually, enrolling in programs, accepting jobs, or moving to a city without a job, the couples carrying on commuter relationships or taking turns following one another—or not. Our best friends live hundreds of miles from us, scattered, and in constant motion. I sometimes wonder if cell phones and Facebook would so easily have replaced address books if it weren’t the case that address books stopped working; that physical addresses now slid from people.
The one difference, of course, is that this time we’ve moved back: we’ve returned to T.’s home state, and to within one strong football rivalry of mine. And from the beginning of our relationship, begun in the wilds of New Mexico, some part of it has been about the Midwest and this myth of our shared heritage.
What did it mean to be Midwestern? Among our grad school friends, we were not uncommon in our fly-over roots, though the others who claimed the lineage seemed to me to have come from less Midwestern-y places. (Is Kansas in the Midwest?) And some had come from Midwestern cities, whereas T. and I could count our hometowns’ stoplights. I knew what it was to drive an hour for the event of back-to-school shopping at Kohl’s. T. knew what it was to be the first of his family to finish college, and subsequently the only member, even of the cousins, to leave. But to New Mexico he’d brought a set of the homemade-game Washers. For friends, I prepared “Midwestern tacos,” which featured iceberg lettuce, ground hamburger with spice from packet, and black olives. Back home, these concoctions were only called “tacos,” just as any food paired with rice and soy sauce was “Chinese.”
In T.’s writing there were corn cobs and crows; in mine, silos and Saran-wrapped casseroles “keeping” on the frozen floorboards of Fords. Maybe I in particular claimed the label Midwestern all the more fiercely once I’d left the place, indulging that perverse part of my personality that refused to accept even gentle teasing and had instead learned to embrace and incorporate such feedback—about my smile, patience, or cheeriness—like a tree growing around an axe blade. When told that my Midwestern stories were, um, nice, I decided I was a regional writer, misunderstood, writing about a region that was misunderstood: its underlying passion masked by a veneer of simplicity; the subtexts of its dialogue too faint for the untrained ear. Maybe, like Alice Munro, what I was doing was Canadian Southern Gothic. The result: twelve more “plots” in which women and lonely teenagers did a lot of longing and staring, driving aimlessly along rural routes or talking politely in diner booths, usually about the weather. Though that was fitting as my primary antagonists were forms of weather: tornado, snow, and the sheer cold of cold itself.
To some dear Texan and New York girlfriends, city-savvy, with whom I huddled in a bar booth at least one full year of grad school, Midwestern meant white bread, fairly synonymously. A sit com of us during that time, or so we said during a dry spell for everybody, would be called No-Sex in Not-A-City. That set would have been cheap, consisting entirely of one torn, plastic-covered bar booth. Of our bartender, viewers would see only a pair of hands. My character, the Midwesterner, would have been some kind of cross between Miranda and Charlotte: a woman, maybe a little awkward or perhaps chunky or geeky, but friendly, one with Miranda’s no-fuss, no-make-up tomboy look and Charlotte’s general prudishness and culturally insular upbringing.
When girlfriends of mine visited from home, my New Mexico friends commented that we all had “such beautiful Midwestern hair,” which I think now means healthy, but totally unstyled. Pony-tail ready. One of those Texan friends has since relocated to Minneapolis, and I keep meaning to ask about the effects on her hair.
In Portland—a place like the Midwest where women can wear tennis shoes and leave hair unstyled—there were lots of Midwesterners; they were all successful people who’d left—that is to say, left successfully. Many whom I encountered were catering, or adjunct teaching. (I was doing both.) When we’d meet up, without speaking of it directly (after all, that wouldn’t be nice), we’d acknowledge what we knew to be the reason for leaving: the Midwest was boring. A Prairie Home Companion was funny, but who could listen for more than an hour? And maybe not at all if you weren’t in the car.
Of course there were people who’d left the Midwest for more serious considerations than bookstores and art scenes, say they were other than white, or gay, or simply men who don’t love football, but who do like to cook, and maybe even bake a little bread or perhaps play the trombone past high school... Or women who wanted to go someplace they wouldn’t forever be known as girl. (There’s one across the street from me here. I haven’t met her yet but I’ve been told by other neighbors: “And that little girl over there? She’s a chemist at Marathon!”) There are reasons that, on the west coast, even people-from-the-Midwest-originally will say, with a wink, “Have a good trip back East,” when you are only flying to Milwaukee.
Perhaps there is something in the American imagination that suggests that those who landed in the Midwest were those who’d headed west, young man, but who hadn’t made it very far. Even here, T. and I have noted the odd quickness with which some locals will put their own town down: All we got here… Now if you wanna drive to Indy… My students write copiously of their boredom and disdain. They long for a place where there’s action, where it’s cool—like, maybe, the glittering Terre Haute.
So maybe it was a very strange thing, and not a normal move, for T. and me this time to load up our life and point our Budget truck East, back to the Midwest, and to the rural Midwest at that: the red patches even in these blue states. When I mentioned that we were leaving Portland to a young man all alone at a vacant truck stop in a deserted stretch of Idaho, he said as much to me, utterly mystified: doesn’t sound like a good trade.
Though we were moving for better jobs, and for a chance at affordable housing, it felt like the end of an odyssey.
We were returning to where we’d come from, originally, to where our stories had started.
And it felt a lot like failing.
