She and her best friend, Chris (still unlaid since October), Ruby and Shawn, pitching that blue tent of theirs on the semi-level ground, setting out their cooking things on the table for the flies, chipmunk and ground squirrels.
They’ve gone from Scranton again (it seems the least excuse will do to avoid that place). Yet Louise never really abandons it, like a perennial flower, returning every year or two for her burst of sunlight.
She has put down pegs to her tent in Scranton, and to pull them up means more pain than just to leave them planted, accepting the pain she knows for the uncertain pain elsewhere.
Yet even now, Louise is changing, adjustments coming after years of failed relationships, the men she’s know having used her repeatedly, but never loved her.
Her child (our child) clings to her like an albatross, growing heavier with every passing year, holding her back from the absolute freedom she craves, a haunting need that goes back even to 1975 when she asked me what I thought if she decided to put Ruby up for adoption.
I wonder if she still thinks this, and whether or not she ever told Rudy, the two of them sleeping side by side at that camp site like hibernating bears, Louise dreaming of leaving Scranton, Ruby praying her mother doesn’t get wander lust again.
Even with its college, Scranton is a trap, a decaying world with no options for advancement, walled in by its limitations, growing each day into a ghetto like where I live in Passaic.
Rudy asked what I see in all the books I read, and doesn’t completely understand when I reply, caught up in some oversimplification of the world the way Wordsworth was in his perception of nature.
Louise doesn’t question it, satisfied with the limitations of her world, haunted by it as the same time, not complete understanding how books can be key to their way out.
In this, I agree with Pauly, when he says every human being has about the same amount of potential. Some tap it in differed ways, some not at all. Some spend their lives dedicated to finding themselves, some accept being permanently lost.
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