Queen of the Road Read online

  If we’d had kids, they’d be little monsters. Then they’d grow up to be big monsters. It’s a benefit to the entire planet that we have chosen to remain childless. Really, the U.N. should give us a humanitarian award.

  Since we had vowed years ago that not having kids would mean we would take advantage of the freedom other people our age didn’t have (something we had yet to do), I finally realized Tim was right about the bus thing and agreed to his plan.

  Although I wouldn’t exactly say I was enthusiastic about it.

  On a cold, dreary Sunday in January 2002, Tim lugged me to an RV show in Denver. Even though he had already been tainted by Bus Conversions magazine, he was still thinking it would be simpler to just buy some sort of trailer to live in. So we trekked through the convention center for hours and hours, holding hands. Tim always holds my hand while we walk, but for once, it felt less like affection and more like fear I would run away. Up and down the aisles we went, in and out through the various rigs: class A’s, B’s, and C’s, fifth wheels, pop-ups, and, Lord help me, camper vans. I suspect he started with the latter, just to get me to the point where I’d be begging to live on a bigger vehicle.

  The very last booth of the day, the one we nearly skipped (my Manolos were killing me), was that of Vanture Coach Manufacturing, Inc. The owner, Chris Brown, and his business partner, John Frank, jovially entertained prospective clients, proudly displaying examples of their craft—the conversion of various types of vehicles (which unfortunately included buses) into motor homes.

  While Chris took another poor deluded man (who stupidly hadn’t been clutching his wife’s hand, as she was nowhere to be found) aside, John walked up to us with a wide smile and explained why converting a bus was a much better idea than buying a ready-made RV.

  “For a little more than buying one new, you can get a bus made to your very own specifications!” he enthused. Tim nodded, transfixed by the wall of bus pictures lining the Vanture booth. John continued, “They’re bigger than most RVs, and of course, for men, big is always better.” Tim licked his lips, images of converted school buses, double-decker buses, and flexible buses barreling down a one-way road deep into his psyche, ripping up the carefully laid foundation of my contented life in their wake. I needed to find a detour. Fast.

  “In a bus,” John confidently intoned, “when you take out the lavatory, the old waste tank makes a great safe!” Drool dribbled down the side of Tim’s mouth. As I sized up the rapidly deteriorating situation, John sensed he had to win me over. I was just about to sink to the depths of desperation with a demure “Honey, let’s go. I have cramps,” when John seemed to figure he had me figured out.

  “With a bus,” he said, eagerly turning my way, “you can have exactly the kind of kitchen you want—” I cut him off with a withering look. What was I worried about? This was going to be too easy.

  “I don’t cook.” Undaunted, he narrowed his eyes, studying me.

  “In a bus,” he said evenly, hands on his hips, “you can design a washer-dryer combina—” I nodded toward my husband, who had by now let go of my hand to better study the bus pictures with the same rapt attention he’d used preparing for his medical board exams.

  “He does the laundry,” I said, challenging John to up the ante. He took a deep breath, pursed his lips, and dropped his eyes to the floor. Slowly, his gaze rose as he took in my swollen feet, unaccustomed to a full day of wearing shoes, their twin cousins, Righty and Lefty Love Handles, and, finally, the trace of an afternoon bonbon lingering on my lips. A smile crept over his face. He folded his hands on his chest and looked me right in the eyes with all the confidence of Ralph Kramden.

  “In-motion satellite TV” was all he said.

  “I…” My hesitation sealed my fate. While most people would assume the man is the vidiot in the family, in ours, Tim hardly ever watches TV. He’s too busy outside, doing stuff. I, on the other hand…John continued with a rush of words, circling in for the roadkill.

  “Your husband can be up front doin’ all the drivin’, while you lay in bed, all nice and cozy…in your pajamas, snuggling with your…” He noted the trace of white fluffy fur stuck to my black Gucci purse.

  “…cat?” He shot me a questioning look. My eyes widened. John stepped back and beamed at me, triumphant.

  “Tim,” I cried weakly. He seemed not to hear, as he stood before the display of buses in various stages of being stripped down to their skins. All that was missing were the front-end pas-ties, fishnet hubcaps, and tantalizing glimpses under the hoods. This called for my favorite whine: full-bodied and piercing, with much more than a hint of provocation.

  “Ti-im!” Still nothing. Forget the finesse.

  “TIM!” He, and the rest of humanity, turned toward me. He could see how shaken I was, but still had trouble peeling his eyes away from the bus porn before coming over.

  “Take me away from the bad man,” I whimpered. He gave John a quizzical look. John gave him a barely perceptible wink and a nod. Then Tim steered me away, as he slipped a Vanture card into his pocket.

  People often wonder how Tim and I could have ended up together. We count ourselves among them. Other than our occupations, I doubt you could find a more disparate pair: Tim loves the outdoors, treats everyone he meets with kindness, and has an intense need to keep busy, to accomplish things. I am more of a misanthropic couch potato. As a clinician, Tim provides care to patients. Through my insurance review work, I deny care to them. When it came time to hit the road and Tim had to give up his practice (which included being medical director of a psychiatric hospital), his patients cried. The staff cried. I even detected tears in the eyes of the janitors, for Tim is a kindred spirit to Everyman.

  On weekends, this mild-mannered psychiatrist sheds his suit and tie, slaps on his safety goggles, laces up his steel-toed boots, and assumes the guise of…Project Nerd, Domestic Superhero. Tim tackles everything around the house. I call it his Pesky Protestant Work Ethic, and give thanks every day that I have not been given that cross to bear myself. Whether it’s installing landscaping (complete with drip irrigation), cleaning gutters (repairing any leaks), or felling sick trees (chopping them into firewood for the winter), by 9 a.m. on a Sunday, my husband has done more than I’ll even think about doing the entire week. (I never did understand that Army commercial. Is getting up before dawn to work your butt off really supposed to be a selling point?)

  I don’t want to give the impression that Tim is an angel. Far from it. He takes full advantage of his knowledge of, well, everything. Not only that, he turns my slothfulness against me every chance he gets. For example: I’m always too hot. Unless it’s winter; then I’m too cold. Yes, part of the problem when the temperature drops outside is that I get around even less, but still, regulating my body heat is just not one of my strong suits and I don’t think I should be penalized for having a disability. Tim, however, thinks I should get bundled up in the winter. He says I should walk around in a sweater—in my own house! To me, that smacks too much of getting dressed. Besides, why should I suffer? I maintain I should be able to wear only my pajamas to keep comfortable and I’m more than willing to make the concession of switching to flannels, but Tim says just because I’m lazy down to a cellular level doesn’t mean he should accommodate me.

  When we first lived together, he noticed the temperature on the thermostat was always higher when he got home after work. But a real superhero doesn’t argue, he swings effortlessly between buildings, flies around the earth to change the course of time, and thwarts armed divisions without any artillery of his own. A domestic superhero simply waits his wife out until she finally has to leave the house to get her hair done. Then he installs a fancy, new, totally-incomprehensible-to-the-double-X-chromosome thermostat. It took me months to figure out where the “override” button was. By then, he had brought home a newer, even more incomprehensible gadget.

  Thus began the Thermostat Wars, which continue to this very day. Just when I seem to have finally bested my enem
y, Tim escalates the conflict by procuring more advanced technology, and the skirmishes begin all over again with my small arms desperately trying to defuse the situation. Détente does not work with my husband. He simply refuses to negotiate, even when I force him to bear witness to my pathetic attempts at staying warm by snatching up an unsuspecting cat and sucking the heat out of my nonhuman shield. My royal title is no match for Tim’s superpowers and I fear I shall forever be consigned to a state of perpetual nonthermostasis.

  I did achieve, however, a small victory after a deliciously satisfying escalation in hostilities the time we visited his father in Arkansas several years before the bus thing.

  Maybe that’s where Tim gets his crazy ideas. Bob worked his entire life as a mail carrier, finally got to retire, and what does he do? Buys a small farm in a small town in Arkansas, running it by himself, to work harder than he ever had in his life. The first time we visited him was in July. July in Arkansas. In fairness to Bob, he did have the air-conditioning turned on. Just not nearly high enough. Tim had the gall to point out the irony of the fact that the number that would have made me positively ecstatic in winter was reducing me to abject misery in summer.

  “What do you want from me?” I cried. “Everyone knows that seventy-six degrees in winter is not equivalent to seventy-six degrees in summer.” Project Nerd was unmoved. Fortunately for me, farm life requires that one go to bed right after dinner. So after Bob retired that first evening, I lowered his pitiful thermostat, a relic from a preindustrial past I had no difficulty whatsoever decoding after years of warfare with his son. Unfortunately for me, however, farm life also requires getting up much earlier than I could possibly consider, and the luxuriating in bed I looked forward to on vacations was marred by rolling around in my own sweat by morning. Bob had been up for hours and had raised the temperature to a post-nuclear level.

  How could two men who had not been particularly close be so alike? We were planning to go to Arkansas again during our bus year. I prayed that spending more time with his father would not mean repairing the distance between them to the extent that Tim’s next harebrained scheme would involve the milking of large, dim-witted mammals.

  By winter of 2003, I was calling all over the country. Because I worked at home sitting at my desk (with two cats vying for my lap), reviewing cases on the phone, and Tim saw patients all day, it was logical that I be the one to search for a bus. Tim determined to teach me about all that mechanical stuff as best he could, and as usual, when my husband puts his mind to something, he gets the job done. No matter how impossible the task.

  I simply can’t abide mechanical things. Still, Tim sat me down in his den, amidst stacks of Bus Conversions magazines, and the lessons began. A lesser man would certainly have thrown in the shop towel. I can’t even tell a Chevy from a Ford from a Honda. Whenever Tim wants to point out a car on the road, he has to say something like “The green one, with four doors.” How could I ever tell buses (which all tend to be painted the same, after all) apart?

  A lot of couples are annoyed by their differences. Tim and I are fascinated by ours. For us, rooting around in each other’s psyches is like studying exotic animals in a zoo. As a result (and partly, I’m sure, because we’re both shrinks), there’s not much we let each other get away with. When nothing was sinking in during our first bus lesson, I tried to pass off my resistance as stupidity. “I just don’t have the head for this stuff,” I protested. Tim would have none of it.

  “You just don’t want to be bothered learning it,” he maintained. As I whined that I really was trying, he got up, went into my office, and returned with one of my magazines. He riffled through the pages and settled on a picture at random.

  “What’s this?” he demanded as he shoved it under my nose. I glanced down and reflexively blurted out, “Badgley Mischka. Spring runway collection.” Tim slammed the magazine shut with a self-satisfied grin and I shut my mouth during the remainder of his painstaking, excruciatingly detailed classes.

  Tim prepared me well—maybe too well, in fact. A typical conversation with a potential seller about his older bus went like this:

  “Is it a 6V92 or an 8V92?” I asked with much more confidence than anyone who had no idea what either one was had a right to possess. I had a suspicion that the latter was more powerful, or maybe it just had two more parts. Or maybe they both had ninety-two parts, but the 8V referred to a volt thing. (Or maybe it was a vixen thing? Mud flaps on big rigs always seem to have saucy silhouettes.)

  “It’s a D Deck,” he answered. Momentarily stumped, I suddenly recalled something Tim had mentioned which had managed to sink in.

  “D Deck two or three?” I probed.

  “It’s a three,” he answered.

  “Hmm,” I mused, toying with my prey. “I’ve heard the threes are less reliable.”

  “Well, ah…” he struggled to respond, but I was off and running.

  “Aluminum wheels? Rust problems? Five- or six-speed?” I finally threw him a bone. “Sounds interesting. I’ll have my husband give you a call. He knows a lot more about this stuff than I do.” The man paused.

  “Ah, ma’am.” He hesitated. “It sure seems like you know enough.”

  I finally happened upon a ’98 Prevost on a Volvo website. Even I knew that a Prevost was the Holy Grail of buses. Rock stars travel in Prevosts. So why not Princesses? When I called, the already low price posted on the Internet had been cut by a third.

  By May 2003, the Prevost was finally parked at Vanture. We had spent nearly six months just finding this bus that now had to be renovated before we could leave on our trip in the summer of 2004.

  I consoled myself with the one bright spot thus far to the whole bus thing.

  Decorating!

  It’s easy to fool yourself when things are on a small scale. A twelve-hundred-dollar handblown glass sink for the bathroom? Well, if it were a house, we’d be buying two, so in a bus, we’re actually saving money! Of course we had to have granite countertops in the kitchen, but did we have to get the most expensive granite known to mankind? We fell in love with the Blue Bahia when we first spotted it at the warehouse; its intense, sparkling azure vein seeming to pulsate as it called out to us from amongst the more mundane slabs.

  “What’s that?” we asked the saleswoman. She hesitated, then whispered its name with a mixture of reverence and fear worthy of one of my ancient forebears daring to utter The Name of Yahweh.

  “It’s the most expensive we have,” she apologized.

  “How much?” Tim asked.

  “Three-twenty a square foot” came the reply.

  “Oh, that’s not so…Wait a minute. You mean three hundred twenty dollars a square foot?” She nodded sheepishly.

  “What do they do, mine it on Mars?” I demanded.

  “Close,” she replied. “Underwater.” Then she added in an even more hushed tone, “If any of the guys drop it, they’re summarily…” Her eyes darted about the warehouse as Tim and I waited, holding our breaths.

  “…fired,” she finally confided, barely audible.

  We were duly impressed. Even more so when, as designers are wont to do, she held up a sample of our lush cherry cabinets to the granite. It was an irresistible combination, but we were prepared to resist. Tim and I pride ourselves on being able to put up a united front on most anything. There was no way we would be daunted. Until she sealed the deal.

  “Oooh!” she exclaimed. “It’s really going to pop your cherry.” With a promise like that, after nearly fourteen years together, we had to have it.

  For the granite, the stainless steel tiles, and the custom appliqué ceiling, it was just too easy to reason, “Well, we’d never get it in a house. But, in a bus? How many square feet could we possibly need?” The answer, when it came to the merino wool window coverings from the Netherlands, was so over the top, I couldn’t help but ask, “What do they do? Fly the sheep over first-class and then shear ’em?”

  Cost, it turned out, was to be only the first
of many, many aspects of bus life we would underestimate.

  Chapter Two

  THE MELTDOWN CRUISE

  * * *

  Phobic Friar

  1 part Frangelico

  1 part raspberry liqueur

  2/3 part Baileys

  Hold martini shaker firmly with both hands; tremble violently; pour down throat.

  * * *

  Before we headed off for the year in the summer of 2004, the Vanture guys had encouraged us to take a “test run,” a shakedown cruise, to “work the bugs out.” Tim and I had no idea what they meant. Unfortunately, we were to find out.

  The day before the launch of our three-week mini-adventure, Peter, the custom electronics guy, still hadn’t finished. Throughout the yearlong bus conversion project, it was evident that Peter had serious issues with time management. (It was only after living in the bus that we discovered he had even more serious issues with custom electronics.) In addition to his time management difficulties, we had also become used to his creative attempts at responsibility management.

  “Ya know, Doreen, it’s just like doin’ a house. The AV guy always gets pushed to the side. In a bus, it’s even worse, ’cause there’s less room. I was in there the other day…”

  Peter finally showed up at 5:30 p.m. It took him four hours to get the Internet up and running, but then there was no TV signal. By 12:30 a.m., I was the one who called it quits.

  “I can live without TV for three weeks,” I told an astonished Tim. “Peter can fix it when we get back.”

  “Are you sure? That’s like normal folk going without food or water,” Tim said, reaching to touch the back of his hand to my forehead.