She wanted other things.
Washington apple orchards.
Summer morning things, with the sun like butter on warm toast, melting across the desert horizon, turned liquid by the heat of the rainless sky.
She knew hot air balloon type things, carousels and carnival rides with seats built for two, and things like fingers sticky with cotton candy and fried dough. She knew frogs and crickets and fields full of tall golden grass, and she knew the inky black of coal mines and the fog that nestles deep into quaint valleys in the middle of the night.
But she’d heard, sometimes, of places where the earth was flat and could stretch on forever without the interruption of rolling, leafy hillsides. She’d heard, sometimes, of damp, dense forests, and of beachside apartments where the back doors slide open to the haunting sounds of seagulls and tugboats. She’d heard, sometimes, of life being like a quilt with pieces from different places stitched together and pulled tight over mattresses in lemon colored bedrooms.
Pam had heard of other things, but she’d never really had them. Not in the palm of her hand, and not brushing against the skin of her. Not enough that she could wrap herself up in them at night, not really.
And she’d certainly never had city streets.
New York City streets with their sigh of impatience and their elbows shoved hard against ribs. These were new things for her, these stealthily-picked-pocket type things and heels-stuck-to-gum-on-the-pavement type things. Horns honking like angry geese and panhandlers circling like vultures, assuming she was just green enough to give them a few dollars. She’d never had little tunnels dug into an ant farm of concrete, full of millions of ants carrying briefcases and cell phones and unhappily pushing past her in her naïve looking floral tops and worn looking Old Navy pencil skirts.
She’d never had streets like this before, and she‘d never had this sort of feeling in her.
Excited fear. Humming fear that pulsed and rattled and made her walk a little bit faster so that maybe she’d get pushed past less often and glared at for some other reason than the simple fact that she walked at a Pennsylvania pace. Eventually, she thought, she would probably find herself huffing and rolling her eyes, glancing over her shoulder at a tourist and requesting none too gently that they get off the sidewalk if they didn’t plan to actually walk on it. She’d heard that the attitude of the city could spread like a disease and it only took a week or so for it to seep into a newcomer. She expected she was no exception.
It was thrilling to finally know what all the books, television shows, and Frank Sinatra sing-alongs had been about all this time, and she felt like there had been good reason to write a song about a place so fascinating. She was finding that coming here on a bus in eighth grade and being herded along by Mrs. Jones the English teacher was not nearly the same as coming here now, like this, alone. So, grinning to herself, she gingerly pushed her way through the crowds, toward the subway and into more things she’d only heard of.
Her time at school went by this way, fast. New and exciting and frenzied, with late night phone calls to Jim and early morning cups of over-brewed Starbucks coffee. She learned some things and forgot others, and the muscle memory of how exactly to transfer a phone call and how many words she typed per minute were slowly replaced by things like auto trace and color correction. Some of her days were wonderful and fresh and successful, and others were horrible and left spread out, salty water marks on the pillow beneath her cheek, but her teachers were patient and she was willing and eager and so she ended up doing fine, really. She ended up doing ok. Like this. Alone, only not exactly.
And there was something like a drug in her independence. Something like addiction in this newness and discovery, and in whatever spare time she happened to have she found herself looking at maps. Staring at them, outlining states in marker and chewing on her lip in consideration. She found herself looking at photographs online and sketching out things she’d never seen in person. Cactus type things, and oasis type things, and things like oceans and mountains with vastness inside of them. She drew a cartoon porcupine and a bald eagle with its eye staring out and off the page. She sat in a diner and she thought about Minnesota and California and whether their plates of pancakes looked the same.
When she finished her program it was with a different sort of look in her eye, so that on her way to the final ceremony she shoved an elbow into a tourist’s side and didn’t say excuse me. She guessed that was as close to being a “New Yorker” as Pam Beesly would ever really get.
The building where she had her classes seemed ordinary to her now instead of seeming huge and intimidating the way it had before. She climbed the stairs and took a seat with some of her twenty-something classmates, and they discussed whether or not there would be cupcakes at the reception. The conversation only half-quieted when her studio teacher stopped on his way past and bent down to shake her hand, saying things like congratulations and good luck and you should be very proud of yourself, and when he eventually stood up tall and walked away whatever witty comment Pam had planned to make died on her lips because Jim was standing in the doorway. Jim was standing there, handsome in the doorway, and she started to cry.
It had felt like forever since she had seen him even though it might’ve just been a week or two, and even though that time had rushed past her with the hustle of speeding E trains and taxi cabs.
He grinned and hugged her and gave her a well-warranted kiss on the lips, and she pressed her palms to his cheeks. She said she wanted to look at him. She said she wanted to take him in, and they stood like that for a second with her hands against his face, until he winked at her and told her she was such a girl, and she blushed and asked her friends to slide down so that he could sit beside her with his hand resting hot and heavy against her knee.
When they called her name people clapped, and when she got home she framed her certificate, even though it seemed like a silly thing to do. It grinned at her, golden and official on the wall of her bedroom, and now that she was back in Scranton her maps seemed to stare at her from the top of her bedside table. She opened them often, thinking about the implications of being in love and almost thirty, her fingers tracing out the routes from Scranton to other places.
Eventually and inevitably Jim found her out, walking in on her sitting on the bed with maps all around, her eyes wide as quarters to be caught wondering about Interstates and highways. Leaning against the doorframe, he crossed his arms and raised his eyebrows at her, amused, and she found her mouth blurting out the secrets that she’d meant to keep inside, or that maybe she hadn‘t even realized she was keeping.
“Let’s move,” she said, and his expression narrowed as he stood up on two feet, tall, curious.
“Pam,” he started, looking over the bedspread covered in her summer obsession of other things. His feet carried him a few steps toward her and he looked her hard in the eye. “What are you…”
“I’m serious,” she assured him, breathless, “I want to get married to you and then I want us to move someplace else.” And his expression shifted, heated up a little, simmered with the mention of marriage, and he glanced down at her empty ring finger. He hadn’t asked her, yet. She wasn’t sure why, but she thought it had something to do with things like carnival rides and seats built for two, and things like fingers sticky with cotton candy and fried dough. She tried to show him that she didn’t care with the look on her face, and when his eyes swept over her she watched him become suddenly, in that moment, less anxious than he had been before. His lingering nervousness from these things like missed opportunities slid away, easy, and she felt excitement bubble childishly in her veins.
“Where?” he finally asked, amused again and intrigued by her.
“I don’t care. Anywhere,” and he chuckled as she mumbled “Rhode Island or New Mexico or something,” looking down at the purple and red outlines on her map of America.
“Roswell, New Mexico?” he teased. “Should we invite Dwight?”
“I want to go someplace really new,” she confessed, ignoring his joke because things were too good, now, for Dunder Mifflin and Dwight. Jim smiled at her and sat down, his thigh brushing up against her knee and making her pulse get a little bit faster. She shrugged to keep herself focused for a second, determined to keep talking because otherwise she might kiss him, and certainly if he did that this conversation would be lost. “I don’t know, isn’t New Mexico the desert? That’s different and exciting,” she assessed. He nodded and she pushed through her drawings, lifting up a sketch of a ski lodge she’d found online, and her words started to spill out fast against his ears because she felt like a child and she loved him. “Or maybe we should go more mountains and snow like Colorado or Vermont or something. Or Oregon, that sounds fun. The Oregon Trail and the gold rush and everything….”
“Yeah I’m pretty sure everyone over there is basically done rushing for gold, but, ok.” He was distracted taking in these pieces of her summer and these outlines of the places neither of them had ever been. She set down the papers in her hands and looked him over, watched him and thought about what he would look like climbing out of the Pacific Ocean or coming home from a jog across yellow desert roads. She thought her throat would close with the possibilities of this and she knew her eyes were shining in that other way they had, lately.
“Jim,” she said quietly, and he lifted his gaze to hers, “this is what I want to do,” and he smiled at her.
“Then this is what we’re doing,” he promised, and he hadn’t even paused first, really. He hadn’t even had to think it over or consider whether it was right or not and that made her childish excitement turn into something else, more sure and more solid. She kissed him dry and fast and clapped her hands together before letting them fall and spread themselves out across her map, her third favorite thing now, behind the engagement ring she hadn’t seen yet and the certificate of completion on her wall. Sighing happily, she grinned at his chuckle beside her.
“You know the largest cheese factory in the world is in Oregon?” she offered and he reared back a little in surprise.
“I did not know that.”
She nodded and tapped on the map lightly, assuring him that it was true because she‘d read it on Wikipedia. He hummed.
“We don’t have cheese factories in Scranton,” he stated, simple and pleased and exactly the way she wanted him to be forever.
“No,” she agreed, letting him wrap his arms around her and feeling warm from the way he kissed the skin of her temple, his lips lingering there and memorizing something important about her, “we don’t.”
And then they started mapping out the routes they would take to all sorts of other cities, and part of her thought that they might just end up right back in Lackawanna County. But, she swore to herself silently, not before they had seen plenty of new places and other things.
Washington apple orchards.
Summer mornings with the sun like butter on warm toast, melting soft and long and delicious across an open and vast desert horizon.
