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The clock in my boyfriend’s car said 2 AM. The wide highway barreling out of Los Angeles was stuffed to the point of obesity with cars despite the hour, white and red headlight taillight streaks burning the edges of my exhausted eyes, and with a more dexterous gesture than I expected, Ben reached over to the clock’s dial. Suddenly it was 3 AM and the radio was blasting “Lips of an Angel” just like before. No one acknowledged that he had just made an hour of our lives disappear before my eyes. Everything around me hummed sinister. The terrible music seemed pedestrian and lacking goals, the orange glow over the highway reminded me of Cheez Doodles and the bloat of L.A.’s suburbs didn’t end. The DJ came on the radio to make a joke about Daylight Savings Time. I wanted my hour back.
“Thanks for coming to pick me up,” I said for the third time that night. My flight from JFK, always a risky adventure in the best of weather, had left four hours late because of storms on the runway. Way past midnight, Pacific time, I had stumbled out of the air-conditioned Burbank airport and into a humidity I thought I’d left behind in New York. Ben waited by the outdoor luggage carousel, easy to spot in the shadows because of the white American Eagle polo shirt he wore. I didn’t know why I had worn my big black leather boots. My favorite shoes, they usually matched the East Coast in my blood. In Burbank they made too much noise on the pavement and sweat was starting to form where the edge of the leather met my calves. Ben took my suitcase, I took his hand, and we small-talked our way into his car and past low, brightly-painted buildings and shuttered taco shops.
“I was bored waiting for you.” Cheez Doodle lamplight and headlight beams splashed over the freckles on his face and his recent haircut. He was still nineteen. I was twenty, and worried about my lost hour. “I wish you took that earlier flight.”
“You realize what that line was like at the information desk?” I decided to blame his whining on something as innocent as exhaustion—he too was on New York’s timezone. “Can we not talk about this anymore?” Finally, signs for Anaheim appeared on the roadside, but Los Angeles seemed to be bleeding into Anaheim. How long could a city go on, I wondered.
He smiled and moved his right hand off the steering wheel to hold my left hand. I always thought of this as some sort of superhuman act. As an inexperienced driver who only traveled down roads that were too crowded and too narrow, I couldn’t fathom driving without both hands gripping the steering wheel like I wanted to send it to a slow, strangled death. Also, this meant he had decided to drop the subject, and I could once again try to enjoy our nocturnal road trip. Suffering through the overload of Americana on the side of the road and the manufactured pop on the radio had to happen in order to get to Ben’s grandparents’ house on the edge of the ocean in Corona del Mar, a town nestled comfortably on the Pacific in the famous Orange County. Not only was it called Crown of the Sea—it was going to be full of palm trees, and warm weather, and allegedly amazing sunsets. I thought of the rain and apathy I had left behind, of how the Northeast’s March and its ambivalence were my some of my least favorite things imaginable. I watched the highway slowly grow less orange, less crowded, more lean and streamlined as we left Anaheim behind. The palm trees by the road looked healthy, not spindly and uncomfortable like the ones I had seen earlier.
“It’s my favorite place in the world,” Ben was saying. “Their house is right on the beach. You just cross the road and go down the cliff.”
“You told me,” I said, happy to hear it again. I thought about how we looked sitting there, with our skin, hair and eye color so nearly identical people who didn’t know we were dating asked if we were related. He wore his polo shirt and khaki cargo shorts and sneakers; I had on my black boots and a black skirt with a jagged hem and a red shirt. We looked like people who would never appreciate one another’s fashion sense. I didn’t want to think about it.
Listening to Ben’s voice soften as we eased further into Orange County reminded me of watching butter melt in the microwave. He started telling stories that after over a year together I hadn’t heard yet. I supposed they wouldn’t have meant much without context. “This is the exit for the restaurant I send you free postcards from.” “This is the hotel we stayed at when my grandpa died and my mom wouldn’t let me go to Disney World because I was supposed to be sad.” Traveling together always opened him up like nothing else did. “One time I got off at the wrong exit over here and spent twenty minutes trying to find the way back.” “The nearest In-N-Out is way too far away.” At 3:30 AM, in a relationship depleted from battling the tepid sunlight and cold whistling nights of February, I was glad for the bland taste of his childhood. My comfort food was never spicy.
Finally we pulled off the highway and onto a quiet, wide road. We stopped talking out of reverence for the welcome change of scenery. The indefatigable DJ droned on about someone named Angie in Anaheim. Ben silenced him with another easy wrist-flick; for once, we agreed on what we wanted to listen to. The car passed slick and easy by ambitious Mexican restaurants, Safeways and a golf course or two. The buildings had been constructed to look old, weatherbeaten, from the days of the conquistadors, as if Junipero Serra, the man who founded the missions that stretch like a necklace up the Californian coast, was going to ride his horse up to the stucco-roofed El Pollo Loco and buy two Crunchy Chicken Tacos. We whisked through this iteration of the American Dream like a contented, greased wind.
Eventually the car left the shopping centers behind, trading them for grand houses with ostentatious driveways straight out of The Sopranos’ opening credits. I asked Ben if I could roll my window down. The air of this no-man’s-land between late night and early morning was heavy with ocean and rain, salt and palm fronds, sleeping houses, sleeping windows. Each traffic light blinked a staunch red in the darkness. We stopped at every one, the only car on the street, centered neatly on the stop line. I had the urge to tell Ben to drive, accelerating through the emptiness and all the red lights. I wanted to do something to announce the surreal qualities the night had taken on in my mind. My body thought it was 6:30 in the morning, I had watched an hour disappear before my eyes, and we were sitting obeying the traffic rules in a desolate wash of new money. I would always wonder why our impulses stalled then, why we were so cautious. Instead, I took Ben’s hand again, and leaned into the car seat, imagining I could hear the ocean.
In a manner of minutes we pulled into the garage behind his grandparents’ house. It had been built before most of the homes that surrounded it, and with its faded clapboard exterior it looked more New England than Orange County. We wrestled my huge suitcase out of the trunk and I asked to see the front porch. This was the house’s ocean-viewing spot, the place I’d been hearing about for weeks. We tramped through the empty house, which had the comforting smell of lace and vintage furniture, and burst through the front door, discarding my suitcase by the stairs. The smell of ocean and rain, salt and palm fronds hit me full in the face, and I sensed a raging power close by, the kind of unbridled force that only the ocean could ever have. Ben pulled on his navy blue sweatshirt and we sat on the porch step. He buried his head in my nest of curly hair.
“Okay, so tell me about everything,” I said.
“Well, see that blinking light over there?”
“Mmhmm?”
“That’s Balboa Pier. We’re going to go there tomorrow. We’ll go to Ruby’s, we can sit outside.”
“What’s Ruby’s?”
“Oh, it’s a diner. Their ice cream and milkshakes are awesome. All right, so there’s the road we were on earlier…”
My mind began to wander and I looked up at the sky, where Cassiopeia’s W was lit up by something more supernatural than neon. I was used to watching my own eastern seaboard constellations: office building windows lit up with people working late, taxicabs blurring by like yellow streaks in the orange night. Out there on the western edge of our country, despite the natural light from the sky, I saw dark. Dark roaring beaches where I would climb rocks in my black boots, the dark hulking shapes of piers where we would eat ice cream and milkshakes, the darkness out in the distance that stretched all the way to Australia, Japan, Indonesia. Dark where we had been. Dark where tomorrow we would drive willingly. The light from the house was nothing but a fuzz, a yellow flicker behind me. I thought again of Ben’s hand reaching out to take away that one hour, and for the second time that evening, I felt something like fear.
