When I was 10 years old, my father accepted a job for the New York State Court of Claims, so we moved from Brooklyn to Albany.  However, my parents' social life continued to be based completely at Brighton Beach Baths (see previous post).  Consequently, we drove three and a half hours each way every weekend every month except January until I went away to college.

Countless hours spent confined with a car with two brothers in the back seat and a troubled marriage in the front, on the New York State Thruway. That major highway was the sinuous cord that connected, at least hypothetically, both halves of our lives. In retrospect it seems inconceivable that parents would unthinkingly subject their children to endless hours of yelling, hitting, crying, and waiting.

The view along the thruway is not particularly scenic. Countless trees, exploded hills, small towns, service areas, roadkill. Hawks circled above us, looking for prey.  We'd see occasional deer springing gracefully in the woods beside the road.  Toll booths, reflectors, lonely exits.

Instead of an exciting double life, those years were schizophrenic, divided, incomplete, glimpsed. Weekdays and school in one city, weekends and summer in another, hours and lifestyles away. Fractured relationships like the broken lines along the Thruway. Yearnings for continuity shattered like all the deer that lay broken and dead along the shoulders of the road.

I still know the names of all the service areas and exits. I remember places, always associated with pain. The one weekend in 10 years that my father had to turn the car around because of my mother's asthma, so resentful. Years later I allowed the truths to enter my consciousness. The Brooklyn life was his alone, filled with sports, alcohol and furtive affairs.

And I remember the automobiles, of course. The '63 Rambler, the '69 Buick, the green station wagon. The interiors of these cars were a living landscape of captivity and longing.